





..£, 

-^^ 



X 









^ .'^■ 



''^,^^/>,*' 



^>. .o\<^' 






4^ ^. 



V 






'v^ y- 




« 'o. 






■ ^ v^'?-' 



'%^.^'' -";.■ 






^%v 


.$^'^. 
.^^' 




•-J, 


0^ ^^^.r?^% % 










« <^ ^ 














■>!'^. 


' » 





" ■' ^^^ 



» I A * \\ 



%. .^^ 



'^. 



<■' 



.^' -^r. 



^- ,x\' 






s .0 -^ 

^0- . 



H '' ■>u ^\ 



d I I ■■ \\' 



.^^' •^-. 



.x\^ 



^Oc 















.^" -v. 



..^' 



i'J' >:'''''''? 



^vi- V"" 



RIVERSIDE TEXTBOOKS 
IN EDUCATION 

EDITED BY ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY 

PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION 
LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY 



THE 

HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE AND PROGRESS CONSIDERED 

AS A PHASE OF THE DEVELOPMENT AND 

SPREAD OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 

ELLWOOD p/cUBBERLEY 

PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION 
LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY 




HOUGHXeN MIFFLIN COMPANY 

BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO 



'1 > .' 









COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLXJDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE 
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM 






CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 

Introduction : The Sources OF OUR Civilization . . . 3 

PART I 

THE ANCIENT WORLD 

FOUNDATION ELEMENTS OF OUR WESTERN CIVILIZATION 
GREECE — ROME — CHRISTIANITY 

Chapter I. The Old Greek Education 

I. Greece and its People 15 

II. Early Education in Greece 21 



Chapter II. Later Greek Education 

III. The New Greek Education 

Chapter III. The Education and Work of Rome 
I. The Romans and their Mission . 



39 



53 
58 
60 

63 
74 



II. The Period of Home Education . 

III. The Transition to School Education 

IV. The School System as finally established 
V. Rome's Contribution to Civilization 

Chapter IV. The Rise and Contribution of Chris- 
tianity 

I. The Rise and Victory of Christianity .... 82 
II. Educational and Governmental Organization of the 

Early Church 92 

III. What the Middle Ages STARTED with .... lOl 

PART II 

THE MEDIyEVAL WORLD 

THE DELUGE OF BARBARISM; THE MEDIEVAL STRUGGLE 
TO PRESERVE AND REESTABLISH CIVILIZATION 

Chapter V. New Peoples in the Empire .... 109 
Chapter VI. Education during the Early Middle Ages 

I. Condition and Preservation of Learning . . .126 

Chapter VII. Education during the Early Middle 

Ages 

"■•■,» 

n. Schools established and Instruction provided . .150 



xli CONTENTS 

Chapter VIII. Influences tending toward a Revival 
OF Learning 

I. Moslem Learning from Spain l8o 

II. The Rise OF Scholastic Theology i86 

III. Law and Medicine as New Studies 192 

IV. Other New Influences and Movements .... 199 

Chapter IX. The Rise of the Universities . . .215 

PART III 

THE TRANSITION FROM MEDIEVAL TO 
MODERN ATTITUDES 

THE RECOVERY OF THE ANCIENT LEARNING; THE 

REAWAKENING OF SCHOLARSHIP; AND THE RISE 

OF RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 

Chapter X. The Revival of Learning 241 

Chapter XI. Educational Results of the Revival of 

Learning 263 

Chapter XII. The Revolt against Authority . . . 287 

Chapter XIII. Educational Results of the Protestant 
Revolts 

I. Among Lutherans and Anglicans 306 

Chapter XIV. Educational Results of the Protestant 
Revolts 

II. Among Calvinists and Catholics 330 

Chapter XV. Educational Results of the Protestant 
Revolts 

HI. The Reformation and American Education . . . 356 
Chapter XVI. The Rise OF Scientific Inquiry , . .379 

Chapter XVII. The New Scientific Method and the 
Schools 

I. Humanistic Realism 397 

II. Social Realism 401 

III. Sense Realism 405 

IV. Realism and the Schools 416 

Chapter XVIII. Theory and Practice by the Middle 
OF THE Eighteenth Century 

T. PrK-EiGHTKKNTH-CeNTTTRV FniTrATinMAT THTrmjic-c /l-^Q 



PREFACE 

The present volume, as well as the companion volume of Readings, 
arose out of a practical situation. Twenty-two years ago, on en- 
tering Stanford University as a Professor of Education and be- 
ing given the history of the subject to teach, I found it necessary, 
almost from the first, to begin the construction of a Syllabus of 
Lectures which would permit of my teaching the subject more 
as a phase of the history of the rise and progress of our Western 
civilization than would any existing text. Through such a study 
it is possible to give, better than by any other means, that vision 
of world progress which throws such a flood of light over all our 
educational efforts. The Syllabus grew, was made to include de- 
tailed citations to historical literature, and in 1902 was published 
in book form. In 1905 a second and an enlarged edition was 
issued,^ and these volumes for a time formed the basis for class- 
work and reading in a number of institutions, and, though now 
out of print, may still be found in many libraries. At the same 
time I began the collection of a series of short, illustrative sources 
for my students to read. 

It had been my intention, after the publication of the second 
edition of the Syllabus, to expand the outline into a Text Book 
which would embody my ideas as to what university students 
should be given as to the history of the work in which they were 
engaged. I felt then, and still feel, that the history of education, 
properly conceived and presented, should occupy an important 
place in the training of an educational leader. Two things now 
happened which for some time turned me aside from my original 
purpose. The first was the publication, late in 1905, of Paul 
Monroe's very comprehensive and scholarly Text Book in the 
History of Education, and the second was that, with the expan- 
sion of the work in education in the university with which I 
was connected, and the addition of new men to the department, 
the general history of education was for a time turned over to 
another to -teach. I then began, instead, the development of 
that introductory course in education, dealing entirely with 

' Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education, with Bibliographies, ist ed., 302 
pp., illustrated, New York, 1902; 2d ed., with classified bibliographies, 358 pp., 
illustrated^ New York, 1905. 



viii PREFACE 

American educational history and problems, out of which grew 
my Public Education in the United States. 

The second half of the academic year 1910-11 I acted as 
visiting Lecturer on the History of Education at both Harvard 
University and Radcliffe College, and while serving in this capac- 
ity I began work on what has finally evolved into the present 
volume, together with the accompanying book of illustrative 
Readings. Other duties, and a deep interest in problems of school 
administration, largely engaged my energies and writing time 
until some three years ago, when, in rearranging courses at the 
Uiuversity, it seemed desirable that I should again take over 
the instruction in the general history of education. Since then 
I have pushed through, as rapidly as conditions would permit, 
the organization of the parallel book of sources and documents, 
and the present volume of text. 

In doing so I have not tried to prepare another history of edu- 
cational theories. Of such we already have a sufficient num- 
ber. Instead, I have tried to prepare a history of the progress 
and practice and organization of education itself, and to give to 
such a history its proper setting as a phase of the history of the 
development and spread of our Western civilization. I have 
especially tried to present such a picture of the rise, struggle for 
existence, growth, and recent great expansion of the idea of the 
improvability of the race and the elevation and emancipation 
of the individual through education as would be most illuminat- 
ing and useful to students of the subject. To this end I have 
traced the great forward steps in the emancipation of the intellect 
of man, and the efforts to perpetuate the progress made through 
the organization of educational institutions to pass on to others 
what had been attained. I have also tried to give a proper set- 
ting to the great historic forces which have shaped and moulded 
human progress, and have made the evolution of modern state 
school systems and the world-wide spread of Western civilization 
both possible and inevitable. 

To this end I have tried to hold to the main lines of the story, 
and have in consequence omitted reference to many theorists 
and reformers and events and schools which doubtless were im- 
portant in their land and time, but the influence of which on the 
main current of educational progress was, after all, but small. For 
such omission I have no apology to make. In their place I have 
introduced a record of world events and forces, not included in 



PREFACE 



IX 



the usual history of education, which to me seem important as 
having contributed materially to the shaping and directing of 
intellectual and educational progress. While in the treatment 
major emphasis has been given to modern times, I have never- 
theless tried to show how all modern education has been after all 
a development, a culmination, a flowering-out of forces and im- 
pulses which go far back in history for their origin. In a civiliza- 
tion such as we of to-day enjoy, with roots so deeply embedded in 
the past as is ours, any adequate understanding of world prac- 
tices and of present-day world problems in education calls for some 
tracing of development to give proper background and perspec- 
tive. The rise of modern state school systems, the variations in 
types found to-day in different lands, the new conceptions of the 
educational purpose, the rise of science study, the new functions 
which the school has recently assumed, the world-wide sweep of 
modern educational ideas, the rise of many entirely new t>TDes of 
schools and training within the past century — these and many 
other features of modern educational practice in progressive 
nations are better understood if viewed in the light of their 
proper historical setting. Standing as we are to-day on the 
threshold of a new era, and with a strong tendency manifest to 
look only to the future and to ignore the past, the need for 
sound educational perspective on the part of the leaders in both 
school and state is given new emphasis. 

To give greater concreteness to the presentation, maps, dia- 
grams, and pictures, as commonly found in standard historical 
works, have been used to an extent not before employed in writ- 
ings on the history of education. To give still greater concrete- 
ness to the presentation I have built up a parallel volume of Read- 
ings, containing a large collection of illustrative source material 
designed to back up the historical record of educational develop- 
ment and progress as presented in this volume. The selections 
have been fully cross-referenced (R. 129; R. 176; etc.) in the 
pages of the Text. Depending, as I have, so largely on the com- 
panion volume for the necessary supplemental readings, I have 
reduced the chapter bibliographies to a very few of the most 
valuable and most commonly found references. To add to the 
teaching value of the book there has been appended to each chap- 
ter a series of questions for discussion, bearing on the Text, and 
another series of questions bearing on the Readings to be found 
in the companion volume. In this form it is hoped that the Text 



X PREFACE 

will be found good in teaching organization ; that the treatment 
may prove to be of such practical value that it will contribute 
materially to reheve the history of education from much of the 
criticism which the devotion in the past to the history of educa- 
tional theory has brought upon it; and that the two volumes which 
have been prepared may be of real service in restoring the subject 
to the position of importance it deserves to hold, for mature stu- 
dents of educational practice, as the interpreter of world progress 
as expressed in one of its highest creative forms. 

Ellwood p. Cubberley 

Stanford University, Cal. 
September 4, 1920 



CONTENTS 



Xlll 



PART IV 

MODERN TIMES 

THE ABOLITION OF PRIVILEGE; THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY; 

A NEW THEORY FOR EDUCATION EVOLVED- 

THE STATE TAKES OVER THE SCHOOL 

Chapter XIX. The Eighteenth a Transition Century 

I. Work of the Benevolent Despots of Continental 

Europe 

II. The Unsatisfied Demand for Reform in France . 

III. England THE First Democratic Nation .... 

IV. Institution of Constitutional Government and Re- 

ligious Freedom in America 

The French Revolution sweeps away Ancient Abuses 



473 
478 
486 

494 
498 



V. 

Chapter XX. The Beginnings of National Education 

I. New Conceptions of the Edltcational Purpose . . 506 
II. The New State Theory in France 508 

III. The New State Theory in America 519 

Chapter XXI. A New Theory and Subject-Maiter for 
the Elementary School 

I. The New Theory stated 530 

II. German Attempts to work out a New Theory . . 533 

^ — III. The Work and Influence of Pestalozzi . . . 539 

IV. Redirection of the Elementary School , . . . 547 

Chapter XXII. National Organization in Prussia 

I. The Beginnings of National Organization . , . 552 
II. A State School System at last created . . . 566 

Chapter XXIII. National Organization in France and 
Italy 

I. National Organization in France 588 

II. National Organization in Italy 603 

Chapter XXIV. The Struggle for National Organiza- 
tion in England 

I. The Charitable-Volunt.\ry Beginnings . . . .613 
II. The Period of Philanthropic Effort (1800-33) • • 622 

III. The Struggle for National Education .... 633 

IV. The Development of a National System .... 644 



Chapter XXV. Awakening an Educational Conscious- 
ness in the United States 

I. Early National Attitudes and Interests . . . 653 
II. Awakening an Educational Consciousness . . . 658 



V 



xiv CONTENTS 

III. Social, Political, and Economic Influences . . . 667 

IV. Alignment of Interests, and Propaganda . . . 672 

Chapter XXVI. The American Battle for Free State 
Schools 

I. The Battle for Tax Support 676 

II. The Battle to Eliminate the Pauper-School Idea . 679 

III. The Battle to make the Schools entirely Free . . 684 

IV. The Battle to establish School Supervision . . 687 
V. The Battle to Eliminate Sectarianism . . . .691 

VI. The Battle to Establish the American High School . 695 
VII. The State University crowns the System . . . 702 

Chapter XXVII. Education becomes a Great National 
Tool 

I. Spread of THE State-Control Idea 71 1 

II. New Modifying Forces 723 

III. Effect of These Changes on Education .... 736 

Chapter XXVIII. New Conceptions of the Educational 
Process 

I. The Psychological Organization of Elementary In- 
struction 745 

II. New Ideas from Herbartian Sources .... 759 

III. The Kindergarten, Play, and Manual Activities . 764 

IV. The Addition of Science Study 772 

V. Social Meaning of these Changes 779 

Chapter XXIX. New Tendencies and Expansions 

I. Political 7^7 

II. Scientific 795 

III. Vocational 805 

IV. Sociological 812 

V. The Scientific Organization of Education . . . 824 

Conclusion; The Future 833 

Index 841 



% 



LIST OF PLATES 

Facing 

1. The Cloisters of a Monastery, near Florence, Italy . . 140 

2. The Library of the Church of Saint Wallberg, at Zutphen, 

Holland 140 

3. Saint Thomas Aqthnas in the School of Albertus Magnus . 190 

4. A Lecture on Theology by Albertus Magnus . . . .228 

5. Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School 278 

6. Educational Leaders in Protestant Germany .... 308 

7. The Free School at Harrow 322 

8. Map showing the Spread of Jesuit Schools in Northern 

Territory by the Year 1725 340 

9. Two Tablets on the West Gateway at Harvard University 364 

10. John Amos CoMENius (1592-1670) 410 

11. Pestalozzi Monument at YvERDON 542 

12. Fellenberg's Institute at Hofwyl 546 

13. Two Leaders in the Regeneration of Prussia .... 568 

14. Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874) . . . 598 

15. John Pounds' Ragged School at Portsmouth .... 618 

16. An English Village Voluntary School 618 

17. Two Leaders in the Educational Awakening in the United 

States 690 

18. Two Leaders in the Reorganization of Educational Theory 762 



LIST OF FIGURES 

1. The Greek Conception" of the World 5 

2. Ancient Greece and the .^gean World 15 

3. The City-State OF Attica 17 

4. Distribution of the Population of Athens and Attica, 

ABOLT 430 B.C. 21 

5. A Greek Boy 25 

6. An Athenian Inscription 26 

7. Greek Writing-Materials 27 

8. A Greek Counting-Board 27 

9. An Athenian School 29 

ID. Greek School Lessons 31 

11. Ground-Plan of the Gymnask'm at Ephesos, in Asia Minor 33 

12. Socrates (469-399 b.c.) 44 

13. Evolution of the Greek University 45 

14. The Greek Univers ty World 47 

15. The Known World ABOUT 150 A.D 48 

16. The Early' Peoples of It.aiy. and the Extension of the 

Roman Po^-er 53 

17. The Principal Roman Roads 54 

18. The Great Extent of the Roman Empire . . . .56 

19. A Roman Father instructing his Son 59 

20. Cato the Elder (234-148 b.c.) 63 

21. Roman Writing-Materials 64 

22. A Roman Col'nting-Board 65 

23. A Roman Primary School 66 

24. A Roman School of Rhetoric 70 

25. The Roman Voll-ntary Educational System, as finally 

evolved 72 

26. Origin of our .\lphabet 77 

27. The Growth of Christianity to the End of the Fourth 

Century 89 

28. A Bishop 96 

29. A Benedictine Monk. Abbot, and Abbess 99 

30. Showing the Final Division of the Empire and the Church 103 

31. A Bodyguard OF Germans no 

32. The German Migrations 112 

33. The Known World IN Soo 114 

34. A German War Chief 115 

35. Romans DESTROYING A Gernl^n \'iLLAGE 116 

36. A Page OF THE Gothic Gospels 119 

37. A Typic.yl Monastery of Southern Europe .... 12S 



LIST OF FIGURES xvii 

38. Bird's-Eye View OF A Medlbval Monastery . . . .130 

39. Initial Letter from an Old Manuscript 133 

40. A Monk in a Scriptorium 134 

41. Charlemagne's Empire, and the Important Monasteries of 

THE Time 136 

42. Where the Danes ravaged England 145 

43. An Outer Monastic School 150 

44. The Medley al System of Education summarized . . .154 

45. A School: A Lesson in Grammar 156 

46. An Anglo-Saxon Map of the World 161 

47. An Early Church Musician 162 

48. A Squire being knighted 168 

49. A Knight of the Time of the First Crusade .... 169 

50. Evolution of Education during the Early Middle Ages . 175 

51. Showing Centers of Moslem Learning 183 

52. Aristotle 185 

53. The Cathedral of Notre Dame, at Paris 189 

54. The City-States of Northern Italy 194 

55. Fragment from the Recovered "Digest" of Justinian . 195 

56. The Father of Medicine, Hippocrates of Cos .... 197 

57. A Pilgrim of the Middle Ages 200 

58. A Typical Medleval Town (Prussian) 203 

59. The Educational Pyramid 205 

60. Trade Routes and Commercial Cities 206 

61. Showing Location of the Chief Universities founded be- 

fore 1600 219 

62. Seal of a Doctor, University of Paris 223 

63. New College, at Oxford 224 

64. A Lecture on Civil Law by Guillaume Benedicti . . . 227 

65. Library of the LTniversity of Leyden, in Holland . . . 228 

66. A University Disputation 231 

67. A University Lecture and Lecture Room 232 

68. Petrarch (1304-74) 244 

69. Boccaccio (1313-75) 245 

70. Demetrius Chalcondyles (1424-1511) 249 

71. Bookcase and Desk in the Medicean Library at Florence 251 

72. Two Early Northern Humanists 253 

73. An Early Sixteenth-Century Press 255 

74. An Early Specimen of Caxton's Printing 256 

75. The World as known to Christian Europe before Colum- 

bus 258 

76. Saint Antoninus and his Scholars 264 

77. Two Early Italian Humanist Educators 266 

78. Guillaume Bud.^us (1467-1540) 268 

79. College de France 269 

80. Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522) „ . . 270 

81. Johann Sturm (1507-89) 272 



xviii LIST OF FIGURES 

82. Desiderius Erasmus (1467-1536) 274 

83. Saint Paul's School, London 276 

84. GiGGLESwicK Grammar School 277 

85. The Evolution of Modern Studies 281 

86. John Wycliffe (i320?-84) 290 

87. Religious Warfare in Bohemia 291 

88. Showing the Results of the Protestant Revolts . . . 296 

89. Huldreich Zwingli (1487-1531) 297 

90. John Calvin (1509-64) 299 

91. A French Protestant (c. 1600) 301 

92. Two Early Vernacular Schools 309 

93. The First Page of Wycliffe's Bible 311 

94. Luther giving Instruction 313 

95. Johannes Bugenhagen (1485-1558) 314 

96. Evolution of German State School Control . . . .319 

97. A Chained Bible 321 

98. A French School of the Seventeenth Century . . . 332 

99. A Dutch Village School 334 

100. John Knox (i505?-72) 335 

loi. Ignatius de Loyola (1491-1556) 337 

102. Plan of a Jesuit Schoolroom ........ 342 

103. An Ursuline 346 

T04. A School of La Salle at Paris, 1688 349 

105. The Brothers of the Christian Schools by 1792 . . . 350 

106. Tendencies in Educational Development in Europe, 1500 

to 1700 353 

107. Map showing the Religious Settlements in America . . 358 

108. Homes of the Pilgrims, and their Route to America . . 359 

109. New England Settlements, 1660 361 

I ID. The Boston Latin Grammar School 362 

111. Where Yale College WAS founded 367 

112. An Old Quaker Meeting-House and School at Lampeter, 

Pennsylvania 370 

113. Nicholas Kopernik Copernicus) (1473-1543) .... 386 

114. Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) 387 

T15. Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642) 388 

116. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) 388 

117. William Harvey (1578-1657) 389 

118. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) 390 

119. The Loss and Recovery OF the Sciences 393 

120. Ren^ Descartes (1596-1650) 394 

121. Francois Rabelais (1483-1553) 399 

122. John Milton (1608-74) 400 

123. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) 401 

124. John Locke (1632-1704) 403 

125. An Academie des Armes 404 

126. A Sample Page FROM the "Orbis PiCTUs" 414 



LIST OF FIGURES xix 

127. Part of a Page from a Latin-English Edition of the " Ves- 

tibulum" 415 

128. Augustus Hermann Francke (1663-1727) 419 

129. A French School before the Revolution 431 

130. A Horn Book 440 

131. The Westminster Catechism 442 

132. Thomas Dilworth (P-ijSo) 443 

133. Frontispiece to Noah Webster's "American Spelling 

Book" 444 

134. Title-Page of Hodder's Arithmetic 445 

135. A "Christian Brothers" School 447 

136. An English Dame School 448 

137. Gravel Lane Charity-School, Southwark 449 

138. A Charity-School Girl in Uniform 450 

139. A Charity-School Boy in Uniform 451 

140. Advertisement for a Teacher to let 452 

141. A School Whipping-Post 455 

142. An Eighteenth-Century German School 455 

143. Children as Miniature Adults 458 

144. A Pennsylvania Academy 463 

145. Frederick the Great 474 

146. Maria Theresa 475 

147. Montesquieu (1689-1755) 480 

148. Turcot (1727-81) 481 

149. Voltaire (1694-1778) 481 

150. Diderot (1713-84) 482 

151. John Wesley (1707-82) 489 

152. Nationality of the White Population, as shown by the 

Family Names in the Census of 1790 494 

153. The States-General in Session at Versailles .... 499 

154. Rousseau (1712-78) 508 

155. La Chalotais (1701-83) 510 

156. RoLLAND (1734-93) 510 

157. Count de Mirabeau (1749-91) 513 

158. Talleyrand (1758-1838) 513 

159. Condorcet (1743-94) 514 

160. The Institute of France 515 

161. Lakanal (1762-1845) 516 

162. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 525 

163. The Rousseau Monument at Geneva 531 

164. Basedow (1723-90) 535 

165. Immanuel Kant (1724- 1804) 537 

166. The Scene of Pestalozzi's Labors . • 541 

167. Fellenberg (1771-1844) 547 

168. The School of a Handworker 556 

169. The Kingdom of Prussia, 1740-86 559 

170. A German Late Eighteenth-Century School .... 564 



XX LIST OF FIGURES 

171. DiNTER (1760-1831) 570 

172. DiESTERWEG (179O-1866) 57I 

173. The Prussian State School System created .... 577 

174. An Old Foundation transformed 589 

175. Count de Fourcroy (1755-1809) 590 

176. Victor Cousin (1792-1 867) 597 

177. Outline of the Main Features of the French State 

School System 598 

178. Europe in 1810 604 

179. The Unification of Italy, since 1848 608 

180. Count of Cavour (1810-61) 609 

181. Outline of the Main Features of the Italian State School 

System 610 

182. A Ragged-School Pupil 618 

183. Adam Smith (1723-90) 621 

184. The Reverend T. R. Malthus (i 766-1 834) 621 

185. The Creators of the Monitorial System 624 

186. The Lancastrian Model School in Borough Road, South- 

WARK, London 626 

187. Monitors teaching Reading AT "Stations" .... 627 

188. Proper Monitorial-School Positions 628 

189. Robert Owen (1771-1858) 630 

190. Lord Brougham (i 778-1 868) 636 

191. An English Village School in 1840 637 

192. Expenditure from the Education Grants, 1839-70 . . 639 

193. Lord T. B. Macaulay (1800-59) 640 

194. Work of the School Boards in providing School Accommo- 

dations 643 

195. The English Educational System as finally evolved . . 649 

196. The First Schoolhouse built by the Free School Society 

IN New York City 661 

197. "Model" School Building of the Public School Society . 665 

198. Evolution of the Essential Features of the American 

Public School System 666 

199. Dates of the Granting of Full Manhood Suffrage . . 670 

200. The First Free Public School in Detroit .... 678 

201. The Pennsylvania School Elections of 1835 .... 682 

202. The New York Referendum of 1850 685 

203. Status of School Supervision in the United States ey 1861 688 

204. A Typical New England Academy 696 

205. The Development of Secondary Schools in the United 

States 699 

206. The First High School in the United States .... 700 

207. High Schools in the United States by i860 .... 701 

208. Colleges and Universities established by i860 . . . 704 

209. The American Educational Ladder 708 

210. The School System of Denmark 713 



LIST OF FIGURES xxi 

211. The Progress of Literacy in Europe by the Close of the 

Nineteenth Century 714 

212. The School System of the Argentine Republic . . .718 

213. The Japanese Two-Class School System 720 

214. The Chinese Educational Ladder 721 

215. Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-73) 724 

216. Charles Darwin (1809-82) 726 

217. Louis Pasteur (1822-95) 727 

218. Man Power before the Days of Steam 729 

219. Threshing Wheat a Century Ago 730 

;20. A City Water-Supply, about 1830 731 

221. The Great Trade Routes of the Modern World . . . 733 

222. An Example of the Shifting of Occupations .... 734 

223. The Philippine School System 740 

224. The First Modern Normal School 749 

225. Teacher-Training in the United States by i860 . . . 752 

226. Evolution of the Elementary-School Curriculum, and of 

Methods of Teaching 756 

227. An "Usher" AND HIS Class 758 

228. Redirected Manual Training 771 

229. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) 777 

230. Thomas H. Huxley (1825-95) 778 

231. A Reorganized Kindergarten 781 

232. The Peking Union Medical College 804 

233. The Destruction of the Trades in Modern Industry . 808 

234. School Attendance of American Children, Fourteen to 

Twenty Years of Age 810 

235. Abbe DE l'Ep6e (1712-89) 819 

236. The Reverend Thomas H. Gallaudet teaching the Deaf 

AND Dumb 819 

237. Educational Institutions maintained by the State . . 820 

238. Karl Georg von Raumer (1783-1865) 825 

239. The Established and Experimental Nations of Europe . 835 

240. The Educational Problems of the Future . . . , 83S 



GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 

In addition to the List of Readings and the Supplemental Ref- 
erences given in the chapter bibliographies, the following works, 
not cited in the chapter bibliographies, will be found in most 
libraries and may be consulted, on all points to which they are 
likely to apply, for additional material: 

I. GENERAL HISTORIES OF EDUCATION 

I. Davidson, Thomas. History of Education. 292 pp. New York, 
1900. 
Good on the interpretation of the larger movements of history. 

*2. Monroe, Paul. Text Book in the History of Education. 772 pp. New 
York, 1905. 

Our most complete and scholarly history of education. This volume should 
be consulted freely. See analytical table of contents. 

3. Munroe, Jas. P. The Educational Ideal. 262 pp. Boston, 1895. 
Contains very good short chapters on the educational reformers. 

*4. Graves, F. P. A History of Education. 3 vols. New York, 1909-13. 
Vol. I. Before the Middle Ages. 304 pp. 
Vol. n. During the Middle Ages. 314 pp. 
Vol. ni. In Modern Times. 410 pp. 

These volumes contain valuable supplementary material, and good chap- 
ter bibliographies. 

5. Hart, J. K. Democracy in Education. 418 pp. New York, igi8. 

An interpretation of educational progress. 

6. Quick, R. H. Essays on Educational Reformers. 568 pp. 2d ed., 
New York, 1890. 

A series of well-written essays on the work of the theorists in education 
since the time of the Renaissance. 

*7. Parker,^ S. C. The History of Modern Elementary Education. 506 pp. 
Boston, 191 2. 

An excellent treatise on the development of the theory for our modem 
elementary school, with some good descriptions of modem practice. 

II. GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF EDUCATION 

I. Cubberley, E. P. Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education. 
358 pp. New York. First ed., 1902; 2d ed., 1905. 

Gives detailed and classified bibliographies for all phases of the subject. 
Now out of print, but may be found in most normal school ajid college 
libraries, and many public libraries. 



XXIV GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 

III. CYCLOPEDIAS 

*i. Monroe, Paul, Editor. Cyclopedia of Education. 5 vols. New York, 
1911-13. 

The most important Cyclopaedia of Education in print. Contains ex- 
cellent articles on all historical points and events, with good selected bib- 
liographies. A work that should be in all libraries, and freely consulted 
in using this Te.xt. Its historical articles are too numerous to cite in the 
chapter bibhographies, but, due to the alphabetical arrangement and good 
cross-referencing, they may be found easily. 

*2. Encylopcedia Britannica. nth ed., 29 vols. Cambridge, igio-ii. 

Contains numerous important articles on all types of historical topics, 
and excellent biographical sketches. Should be consulted freely in using this 
Text. 

IV. MAGAZINES 

*i . Barnard's American Journal of Education. Edited by Henry Barnard. 
31 vols. Hartford, 1855-81. Reprinted, Syracuse, 1902. Index 
to the 31 vols, published by the United States Bureau of Education, 
Washington, 1892. 

A wonderful mine of all kinds of historical and educational information, 
and should be consulted freely on all points relating to European or American 
educational history. 

In the chapter bibliographies, as above, the most important 
references are indicated with an asterisk (*). 



THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

INTRODUCTION 

THE SOURCES OF OUR CIVILIZATION 

The Civilization which we of to-day enjoy is a very complex 
thing, made up of many different contributions, some large and 
some small, from people in many different lands and different 
ages. To trace all these contributions back to their sources would 
be a task impossible of accomplishment, and, while specific 
parts would be interesting, for our purposes they would not be im- 
portant. Especially would it not be profitable for us to attempt 
to trace the development of minor features, or to go back to the 
rudimentary civilizations of primitive peoples. The early de- 
velopment of civilization among the Chinese, the Hindoos, the 
Persians, the Egyptians, or the American Indians all alike present 
features which to some form a very interesting study, but our 
western civilization does not go back to these as sources, and con- 
sequently they need not concern us in the study we are about to 
begin. While we have obtained the alphabet from the Phcenicians 
and some of our mathematical and scientific developments through 
the medium of the Mohammedans, the real sources of our present- 
day civilization lie elsewhere, and these minor sources will be 
referred to but briefly and only as they influenced the course of 
western progress. 

The civilization which we now know and enjoy has come down 
to us from four main sources. The Greeks, the Romans, and the 
Christians laid the foundations, and in the order named, and the 
study of the early history of our western civilization is a study 
of the work and the blending of these three main forces. It is 
upon these three foundation stones, superimposed upon one an- 
other, that our modern European and American civilization has 
been developed. The Germanic tribes, overrunning the bound- 
aries of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, 
added another new force of largest future significance, and one 



4 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

which profoundly modified all subsequent progress and develop- 
ment. To these four main sources we have made many additions 
in modern times, building an entirely new superstructure on the 
old foundations, but the groundwork of our civilization is com- 
posed of these four foundation elements. For these reasons a 
history of even modern education almost of necessity goes back, 
briefly at least, to the work and contributions of these ancient 
peoples. 

Starting, then, with the work of the Greeks, we shall state 
briefly the contributions to the stream of civilization which have 
come down to us from each of the important historic peoples or 
groups or forces, and shall trace the blending and assimilating 
processes of the centuries. While describing briefly the educa- 
tional institutions and ideas of the different peoples, we shall be 
far less concerned, as we progress down the centuries, with the 
educational and philosophical theories advanced by thinkers 
among them than with what was actually done, and with the last- 
ing contributions which they made to our educational practices 
and to our present-day civilization. 

The work of Greece lies at the bottom and, in a sense, was the 
most important of all the earlier contributions to our education 
and civilization. These people, known as Hellenes, were the 
pioneers of western civilization. Their position in the ancient 
world is well shown on the map reproduced opposite. To the East 
lay the older political despotisms, with their caste-type and in- 
tellectually stagnant organization of society, and to the North 
and West a little-known region inhabited by barbarian tribes. 
It was in such a world that our western civilization had its birth. 
These Greeks, and especially the Athenian Greeks, represented 
an entirely new spirit in the world. In place of the repression 
of all individuality, and the stagnant conditions of society that 
had characterized the civilizations before them, they developed a 
civilization characterized by individual freedom and opportunity, 
and for the first time in world history a premium was placed on 
personal and political initiative. In time this new western spirit 
was challenged by the older eastern type of civilization. Long 
foreseeing the danger, and in fear of what might happen, the 
little Greek States had developed educational systems in part de- 
signed to prepare their citizens for what might come. Finally, in 
a series of memorable battles, the Greeks, led by Athens, broke 
the dread power of the Persian name and made the future of this 



INTRODUCTION 5 

new tyipe of civilization secure. At Marathon, Salamis, and 
Platasa the fate of our western civilization trembled in the bal- 
ance. Now followed the great creative period in Greek life, dur- 
ing which the Athenian Greeks matured and developed a litera- 
ture, philosophy, and art which were to be enjoyed not only by 
themselves, but by all western peoples since their time. In these 
Hnes of culture the world will forever remain debtor to this small 
but active and creative people. 



A-fnalchium Mare 




Fig. I. The Early Greek Conception of the World 

The World accordinj? to Hecataeus, a geographer of Miletus, Asia Minor. Hecataeus 
was the first Greek traveler and geographer. The map dates from about 500 B.C. 



The next great source of our western civilization was the work 
of Rome. Like the Greeks, the Romans also occupied a penin- 
sula jutting southward into the Mediterranean, but in most re- 
spects they were far different in type. Unlike the active, imagina- 
tive, artistic, and creative Greeks, the Romans were a practical, 
concrete, unimaginative, and executive people. Energy, person- 
ality, and executive power were in greatest demand among them- 



6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The work of Rome was political, governmental, and legal — not 
artistic or intellectual. Rome was strong where Greece was 
weak, and weak where Greece was strong. As a result the two 
peoples supplemented one another well in laying the foundations 
for our western civilization. The conquests of Greece were intel- 
lectual; those of Rome legal and governmental. Rome absorbed 
and amalgamated the whole ancient world into one Empire, to 
which she gave a common language, dress, manners, religion, 
literature, and political and legal institutions. Adopting Greek 
learning and educational practices as her own, she spread them 
throughout the then-known world. By her political organiza- 
tion she so fixed Roman ideas as to law and government through- 
out the Empire that Christianity built firmly on the Roman 
foundations, and the German barbarians, who later swept over 
the Empire, could neither destroy nor obliterate them. The Ro- 
man conquest of the world thus decisively influenced the whole 
course of western history, spread and perpetuated Greek Ideas, 
and ultimately saved the world from a great disaster. 

To Rome, then, we are indebted most of all for ideas as to gov- 
ernment, and for the introduction of law and order into an unruly 
world. In all the intervening centuries between ancient Rome 
and ourselves, and in spite of many wars and repeated onslaughts 
of barbarism, Roman governmental law still influences and guides 
our conduct, and this influence is even yet extending to other 
lands and other peoples. We are also indebted to Rome for many 
practical skills and for important engineering knowledge, which 
was saved and passed on to Western Europe through the medium 
of the monks. On the other side of the picture, the recent great 
World War, with all its awful destruction of life and property, and 
injury to the orderly progress of civilization, may be traced di- 
rectly to the Roman idea of world empire and the sway of one 
imperial government, imposing its rule and its culture on the rest 
of mankind. 

Into this Roman Empire, united and made one by Roman 
arms and government, came the first of the modern forces in the 
ancient world — that of Christianity — the third great foundation 
element in our western civilization. Embracing in its early 
development many Greek philosophical ideas, building securely 
on the Roman governmental organization, and with its new mes- 
sage for a decaying world, Christianity forms the connecting link 
between the ancient and modern civilizations. Taking the 



INTRODUCTION 7 

conception of one God which the Jewish tribes of the East had 
developed, Christianity changed and expanded this in such a way 
as to make it a dominant idea in the world. Exalting the teach- 
ings of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the future 
life, and the need for preparation for a hereafter, Christianity 
introduced a new type of religion and offered a new hope to the 
poor and oppressed of the ancient world. In so doing a new 
ethical force of first importance was added to the effective ener- 
gies of mankind, and a basis for the education of all was laid, for 
the first time, in the history of the world. 

Christianity came at just the right time not only to impart new 
energy and hopefulness to a decadent ancient civilization, but also 
to meet, conquer, and in time civilize the barbarian hordes from 
the North which overwhelmed the Roman Empire. A new and 
youthful race of German barbarians now appeared upon the 
scene, with resulting ravage and destruction, and anarchy and 
ignorance, and long centuries ensued during which ancient civili- 
zation fell prey to savage violence and superstition. Progress 
ceased in the ancient world. The creative power of antiquity 
seemed exhausted. The digestive and assimilative powers of the 
old world seemed gone. Greek was forgotten. Latin was cor- 
rupted. Knowledge of the arts and sciences was lost. Schools 
disappeared. Only the Christian Church remained to save civili- 
zation from the wreck, and it, too, was almost submerged in the 
barbaric flood. It took ten centuries partially to civihze, educate, 
and mould into homogeneous units this heterogeneous horde of 
new peoples. During this long period it required the strongest 
energies of the few who understood to preserve the civilization 
of the past for the enjoyment and use of a modern world. 

Yet these barbarian Germans, great as was the havoc they 
wrought at first, in time contributed much to the stream of our 
modern civilization. They brought new conceptions of individual 
worth and freedom into a world thoroughly impregnated with the 
ancient idea of the dominance of the State over the individual. 
The popular assembly, an elective king, and an independent and 
developing system of law were contributions of first importance 
which these peoples brought. The individual man and not the 
State was, with them, the important unit in society. In the 
hands of the Angles and Saxons, particularly, but also among the 
Celts, Franks, Helvetii, and Belgae, this idea of individual free- 
dom and of the subordination of the State to the individual has 



8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

borne large fruit in modern times in the self-governing States 
of France, Switzerland, Belgium, England and the English self- 
governing dominions, and in the United States of America. 
After much experimenting it now seems certain that the Anglo- 
Saxon type of self-government, as developed first in England and 
further expanded in the United States, seems destined to be the 
type of government in future lo rule the world. 

It took Europe almost ten centuries to recover from the ef!"ects 
of the invasion of barbarism which the last two centuries of the 
Roman Empire witnessed, to save itself a little later from Moham- 
medan conquest, and to pick up the lost threads of the ancient 
life and begin again the work of civilization. Finally, however, 
this was accomplished, largely as a result of the labor of monks 
and missionaries. The barbarians were in time induced to settle 
down to an agricultural life, to accept Christianity in name at 
least, and to yield a more or less grudging obedience to monk and 
priest that they might thereby escape the torments of a world to 
come. Slowly the monasteries and the churches, aided here and 
there by far-sighted kings, worked at the restoration of book? and 
learning, and finally, first in Italy, and later in the nations evolved 
from the tribes that had raided the Empire, there came a period of 
awakening and rediscovery which led to the development of the 
early university foundations, a wonderful revival of ancient learn- 
ing, a great expansion of men's thoughts, a great religious awak- 
ening, a wonderful period of world exploration and discovery, the 
founding of new nations in new lands, the reawakening of thf= 
spirit of scientific inquiry, the rise of the democratic spirit, and 
the evolution of our modern civilization. 

By the end of the eleventh century it was clear that the long 
battle for the preservation of civilization had been won, but it was 
not until the fourteenth century that the Revival of Learning in 
Italy gave clear evidence of the rise of the modern ^irit. By 
the year 1 500 much had been accomplished, and the new modern 
questioning spirit of the Italian Revival was making progress in 
many directions. Most of the old learning had been recovered; 
the printing-press had been invented, and was at work multiply- 
ing books; the study of Greek and Hebrew had been revived in 
the western world; trade and commerce had begun; the cities and 
the universities which had arisen had become centers of a new life ; 
a new sea route to India had been found and was in use ; Colum- 
bus had discovered a new world; the Church was more tolerant 



INTRODUCTION 9 

of new ideas than it had been for centuries ; and thought was be- 
ing awakened in the western world to a degree that had not taken 
place since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about 
ready for rapid advances in many directions, and great progress 
in learning, education, government, art, commerce, and inven- 
tion seemed almost within its grasp. Instead, there soon opened 
the most bitter and vindictive religious conflict the world has 
ever known; western Christian civilization was torn asunder; 
a century of religious warfare ensued; and this was followed by 
other centuries of hatred and intolerance and suspicion awak- 
ened by the great conflict. 

Still, out of this conflict, though it for a time checked the or- 
derly development of civilization, much important educational 
progress was ultimately to come. In promulgating the doctrine 
that the authority of the Bible in religious matters is superior to 
the authority of the Church, the basis for the elementary school 
for the masses of the people, and in consequence the education of 
all, was laid. This meant the creation of an entirely new type 
of school — the elementary, for the masses, and taught in the 
native tongue — to supplement the Latin secondary schools which 
had been an outgrowth of the revival of ancient learning, and the 
still earlier cathedral and monastery schools of the Church. 

The modern elementary vernacular school may then be said to 
be essentially a product of the Protestant Reformation. This 
is true in a special sense among those peoples which embraced some 
form of the Lutheran or Calvinistic faiths. These were the Ger- 
mans, Moravians, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Dutch, 
Walloons, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, and 
the English Puritans. As the Renaissance gave a new emphasis 
to the development of secondary schools by supplying them with 
a large amount of new subject-matter and a new motive, so the 
Reformation movement gave a new motive for the education of 
children not intended for the service of the State or the Church, 
and the development of elementary vernacular schools was the 
result. Only in England, of all the revolting countries, did this 
Protestant conception as to the necessity of education for salva- 
tion fail to take deep root, with the result that elementary edu- 
cation in England awaited the new political and social and in- 
dustrial impulses of the latter half of the nineteenth century for 
its real development. 

The rise of the questioning and inferring spirit in the Italian 



lo HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Renaissance marked the beginnings of the transition from mediae- 
val to modern attitudes, and one of the most important out- 
growths of this was the rise of scientific inquiry which in time 
followed. This meant the application of human reason to the 
investigation of the phenomena of nature, with all that this 
eventually implied. This, slowly to be sure, turned the energies 
of mankind in a new direction, led to the substitution of inquiry 
and patient experimentation for assumption and disputation, and 
in time produced a scientific and industrial revolution which has 
changed the whole nature of the older problems. The scientific 
spirit has to-day come to dominate all lines of human thinking, 
and the applications of scientific principles have, in the past cen- 
tury, completely changed almost all the conditions surrounding 
human life. Applied to education, this new spirit has transformed 
the instruction and the methods of the schools, led to the crea- 
tion of entirely new types of educational institutions, and intro- 
duced entirely new aims and methods and purposes into the edu- 
cational process. 

From inquiry into religious matters and inquiry into the 
phenomena of nature, it was but a short and a natural step to 
inquiry into the nature and functions of government. This led 
to a critical questioning of the old established order, the rise of 
new types of intellectual inquiry, the growth of a consciousness 
of national problems, and the bringing to the front of questions oi 
political interest to a degree unknown since the days of ancient 
Rome. The eighteenth century marks, in these directions, a 
sharp turning-point in human thinking, and the end of mediaeval- 
ism and the ushering in of modern forms of intellectual liberty. 
The eighteenth century, too, witnessed a culmination of a long 
series of progressive changes which had been under way for cen- 
turies, and the flood time of a slowly but steadily rising tide of 
protest against the enslavement of the intellect and the limita- 
tion of natural human liberties by either Church or State. The 
flood of individualism which characterized the second half of the 
eighteenth century demanded outlet, and, denied, it rose and 
swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers — religious, 
intellectual, social, and political — and opened the way for the 
marked progress in all lines which characterized the nineteenth 
century. Out of this new spirit was to come the American and the 
French Revolutions, the establishment of constitutional liberty 
and religious freedom, the beginnings of the abolition of privilege, 



INTRODUCTION il 

the rise of democracy, a great extension of educational advan- 
tages, and the transfer of the control of the school from the Church 
to the State that the national welfare might be better promoted 
thereby. 

Now arose the modern conception of the school as the great 
constructive instrument of the State, and a new individual and 
national theory as to both the nature and the purpose of education 
was advanced. Schools were declared to be essentially civil af- 
fairs; their purpose was asserted to be to promote the common 
welfare and advance the interests of the political State; minis- 
ters of education began to be appointed by the State to take over 
and exercise control; the citizen supplanted the ecclesiastic in 
the organization of education and the supervision of classroom 
teaching; the instruction in the school was changed in direction, 
and in time vastly broadened in scope; and the education of all 
now came to be conceived of as a birthright of the child of every 
citizen. 

Since the middle of the nineteenth century a great world move- 
ment for the realization of these new aims, through the taking- 
over of education from religious bodies and the establishment of 
state-controlled school systems, has taken place. This move- 
ment is still going on. Beginning in the nations which were 
earliest in the front of the struggle to preserve and extend what 
was so well begun by little Greece and Imperial Rome, the state- 
control conception of education has, in the past three quarters 
of a century, spread to every continent on the globe. For ages 
a Church and private affair, of no particular concern to govern- 
ment and of importance to but a relatively small number of the 
people, education has to-day become, with the rise and spread of 
modern ideas as to human freedom, political equality, and in- 
dustrial progress, a prime essential to the maintenance of good 
government and the promotion of national welfare, and it is now 
so recognized by progressi'/e nations everywhere. With the 
spread of the state-control idea as to education have also gone 
western ideas as to government, human rights, social obligations, 
political equality, pure and applied science, trade, industry, 
transportation, intellectual and moral improvement, and human- 
itarian influences which are rapidly transforming and modern- 
izing not only less progressive western nations, but ancient civili- 
zations as well, and along the lines so slowly and so painfully 
worked out by the inheritors of the conceptions of human free- 



12 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

dom first thought out in Httle Greece, and those of political 
equality and government under law so well worked out by an- 
cient Rome. Western civilization thus promises to become the 
dominant force in world civilization and human progress, with 
general education as its agent and greatest constructive force. 

Such is a brief outline sketch of the history of the rise and 
spread and progress of our western civilization, as expressed in 
the history of the progress of education, and as we shall trace it 
in much more detail in the chapters which are to follow. The 
road that man has traveled from the days when might made right, 
md when children had no claims which the State or parents were 
bound to respect, to a time when the child is regarded as of first 
importance, and adults represented in the State declare by law 
that the child shall be protected and shall have abundant educa- 
tional advantages, is a long road and at times a very crooked 
one. Its ups and downs and forward movements have been those 
of the progress of the race, and in consequence a history of edu- 
cational progress must be in part a history of the progress of 
civilization itself. Human civilization, though, represents a 
more or less orderly evolution, and the education of man stands 
as one of the highest expressions of a belief in the improvability 
of the race of which mankind is capable. 

It is such a development that we propose to trace, and, having 
now sketched the broader outlines of the treatment, we next turn 
to a filling-in of the details, and begin with the Ancient World and 
the first foundation element as found in the little City-States 
of ancient Greece. 



PART I 
THE ANCIENT WORLD 

THE FOUNDATION ELEMENTS OF OUR 

WESTERN CIVILIZATION 

GREECE — ROME — CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER I 

THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 

I. GREECE AND ITS PEOPLE 

The land. Ancient Greece, or Hellas as the Greeks called their 
homeland, was but a small country. The map given below shows 
the JEgesLTi world superimposed on the States of the old Northwest 
Territory, from which it may be seen that the Greek mainland 
was a little less than half as large as the State of Illinois. Greece 
proper was about the size of the State of West Virginia, but it was 




60 100 150; 



«_ ,' 



Fig. 2. Ancient Greece and the ^gean World 

Superimposed on the East-North-Central Group of American States, to show rela- 
tive size. Dotted lines indicate the boundaries of the American States — Illinois, 
Indiana, Kentucky, etc. All of Greece will be seen to be a little less than half the 
size of the State of Illinois, the ^gean Sea about the size of the State of Indiana, 
and Attica not quite so large as two average-size Illinois counties. 



1 6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

a much more mountainous land. No spot in Greece was over 
forty miles from the sea. Attica, where a most wonderful intel- 
lectual life arose and flourished for centuries, and whose contri- 
butions to civilization were the chief glory of Greece, was smaller 
than two average-size Illinois counties, and about two thirds the 
size of the little State of Rhode Island.^ The country was 
sparsely populated, except in a few of the City-States, and prob- 
ably did not, at its most prosperous period, contain much more 
than a million and a half of people — citizens, foreigners, and 
slaves included. 

The land was rough and mountainous, and deeply indented by 
the sea. The climate and vegetation were not greatly unlike the 
climate and vegetation of Southern California. Pine and fir on 
the mountain-slopes, and figs, olives, oranges, lemons, and grapes 
on the hillsides and plains below, were characteristic of the land. 
Fishing,^agriculture, and the raising of cattle and sheep were the 
important industries. A temperate, bracing climate, short, mild 
winters, and a long, dry summer gave an opportunity for the de- 
velopment of this wonderful civilization. Like Southern Cali- 
fornia or Florida in winter, it was essentially an out-of-doors 
country. The high mountains to the rear, the sun-steeped skies, 
and the brilliant sea in front were alike the beauty of the land 
and the inspiration of the people. Especially was this true of 
Attica, which had the seashore, the plain, the high mountains, 
and everywhere magnificent views through an atmosphere of 
remarkable clearness. A land of incomparable beauty and charm, 
it is little wonder that the Greek citizen, and the Athenian 
in particular, took pride in and loved his country, and was 
willing to spend much time in preparing himself to govern and 
defend it. 

The government. Politically, Greece was composed of a num- 
ber of independent City-States of small size. They had been set- 
tled by early tribes, which originally held the land in common. 
Attica, with its approximately seven hundred square miles of 
territory, was an average-size City-State. The central city, the 
surrounding farming and grazing lands, and the coastal regions 
all taken together, formed the State, the citizens of which — city- 
residents, farmers, herdsmen, and fishermen — controlled the 

^ The average size of an Illinois county is 550 square miles, or an area 22X25 miles 
square. The State of West Virginia contains 24,022 square miles, and Rhode 
Island 1067 square miles. Rhode Island would be approximately 30X36 miles 
square, which would make Attica approximately 20X36 miles square in area. 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 



17 



government. There were in all some twenty of these City-States 
in mainland Greece, the most important of which were Attica, 
of which Athens was the central city; Laconia, of which Sparta 
was the central city; and Boeotia, of which Thebes was the central 
city. Some of the States developed democracies, of which class 
Athens became the most notable example, while some were gov- 
erned as oligarchies. Of all the different States but few played 
any conspicuous part in the history of Greece. Of these few 
Attica stands clearly above them all as the leader in thought and 
art and the most progressive in government. Here, truly, was a 
most wonderful people, and it 
is with Attica that the student 
of the history of education is 
most concerned. The best of 
all Greece was there. 

The Httle City-States of 
Greece, as has just been said, 
were independent States, just 
like modern nations. While 
all the Greeks regarded them- 
selves as tribes of a single 
family, descended from a com- 
mon ancestor, Hellen, and the 
bonds of a common race, lan- 
guage, and religion tended to 
unite them into a sort of 
brotherhood, the different City- 
States were held apart by their 
tribal origms, by narrow polit- 
ical sympathies, and by petty laws. A citizen of one city, for 
example, was an alien in another, and could not hold property or 
marry in a city not his own. Such attitudes and laws were but 
natural, the time and age considered. 

Sometimes, in case of great danger, as at the time of the Persian 
invasions {4g2-^'jg B.C.), a number of the States would combine to 
form a defensive league ; at other times they made war on one an- 
other. The federal principle, such as we know it in the United 
States in our state and national governments, never came into 
play. At different times Athens, Sparta, and Thebes aspired to 
the leadership of Greece and tried to unite the little States into a 
Hellenic Nation, but the mutual jealousies and the extreme indi 




Scale of Miles 



Fig. 3. The City-State of Attica 



1 8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

vidualism of the people, coupled with the isolation of the States 
and the difficulties of intercommunication through the mountain 
passes, stood in the way of any permanent union. ^ What Rome 
later accomplished with relative ease and on a large scale, Greece 
was unable to do on even a small scale. A lack of capacity to 
unite for cooperative undertakings seemed to be a fatal weakness 
of the Greek character. 

The people. The Greeks were among the first of the European 
peoples to attain to any high degree of civilization. Their story 
runs back almost to the dawn of recorded history. As early as 
3500 B.C. they were in an advanced stone age, and by 2500 B.C. had 
reached the age of bronze. The destruction of Homer's Troy 
dates back to 1200 B.C.. and the Homeric poems to iioo B.C., while 
an earlier Troy (Schliemann's second city) goes back to 2400 B.C. 
This history concerns the mainland of Asia Minor. By 1000 B.C. 
the southern peninsula of Greece had been colonized, between 900 
and 800 B.C. Attica and other portions of upper Greece had been 
settled, and by 650 B.C. Greek colonization had extended to many 
parts of the Mediterranean.- 

The lower part of the Greek peninsula, known as Laconia, was 
settled by the Dorian branch of the Greek family, a practical, 
forceful, but a wholly unimaginative people. Sparta was their 
most important city. To the north were the Ionic Greeks, a 
many-sided and a highly imaginative people. Athens was their 

1 The nearest analogy we have to the Greek City-States exists in the local town 
governments of the New England States, particularly JNIassachusetts, and the local 
county-unit governmental organizations of a number of the Southern States, though 
in each of these cases we have a state and a federal government above to unify and 
direct and control these small local governments, which did not exist, except tempo- 
rarily, in Greece. 

If an area the size of West Virginia were divided into some twenty independent 
counties, which could arrange treaties, make alliances, and declare war, and which 
sometimes united into leagues for defense or offense, but which were never able to 
unite to form a single State, we should have a condition analogous to that of main- 
land Greece. 

2 A sea-faring people, the Greeks became to the ancient Mediterranean world 
what the English have been to the modern world. Southern Italy became so 
thickly set with small Greek cities that it was known as Magna Gracia. On the 
island of Sicily the city of Syracuse was founded (734 B.C.), and became a center of 
power and a home of noted Greeks. The city of Marseilles, in southern France, 
dates from an Ionic settlement about 600 B.C. The presence of another seafaring 
people, the Phoenicians, along the northern coast of Africa and southern and eastern 
Spain, probably checked the further spread of Greek colonies to the westward. The 
city of Gyrene, in northern Africa, dates from about 630 B.C. Greek colonists also 
went north and east, through the Dardanelles and on into the Black Sea. (See map. 
Figure 2.) Salonica and Constantinople date back to Greek colonization. Many of 

he colonies reflected great honor and credit on the motherland, and served to 
.-rfrp-^H Greek manners, language, and religion over a wide area. 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 19 

chief city. In the settlement of Laconia the Spartans imposed 
themselves as an army of occupation on the origmal inhabitants, 
whom they compelled to pay tribute to them, and established a 
military monarchy in southern Greece. The people of Attica, on 
the other hand, absorbed into their own body the few earlier set- 
tlers of the Attic plain. They also established a monarchy, but, 
being a people more capable of progress, this later evolved into a 
democracy. The people of Attica were in consequence a some- 
what mixed race, which possibly in part accounts for their greater 
intellectual ability and versatility.^ 

It accounts, though, only in part. Climate, beautiful surround- 
ings, and contact with the outside world probably also contrib- 
uted something, but the real basis underneath was the very su- 
perior quality of the people of Attica. In some way, just how we 
do not know, these people came to be endowed with a superior 
genius and the rather unusual ability to make those progressive 
changes in living and government which enabled them to make 
the most of their surroundings and opportunities, and to advance 
while others stood still. Far more than other Greeks, the people 
of Attica were imaginative, original, versatile, adaptable, pro- 
gressive, endowed with rare mental ability, keenly sensitive to 
beauty in nature and art, and possessed of a wonderful sense of 
proportion and a capacity for moderation m all things. Only 
on such an assumption can we account for their marvelous 
achievements in art, philosophy, literature, and science at this 
very early period in the development of the civilization of the 
world. 

Classes in the population. Greece, as was the ancient world in 
general, was built politically on the dominant power of a ruling 
class. In consequence, all of course could not become citizens 
of the State, even after a democracy had been evoK^ed. Citizen- 
ship came with birth and proper education, and, before 509 B.C., 
foreigners were seldom admitted to privileges in the State. Only 
a male citizen might hold office, protect himself in the courts, own 
land, or attend the public assemblies. Only a citizen, too, could 
participate in the religious festivals and rites, for religion was an 
affair of the ruling famihes of the State. In consequence, family, 
rehgion, and citizenship were all bound up together, and educa- 

1 It is the great mixed races that have counted for most in history. The strength 
of England is in part due to its wonderful mixture of peoples — Britons, Angles, 
Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Northmen, to mention only the more important earlier peo- 
ples which have been welded together to form the English people, 



20 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tion and training were chiefly for citizenship and reHgious (moral) 
ends. 

Even more, citizenship everywhere in the earher period was a 
degree to be attained to only after proper education and prelim- 
inary military and political training. This not only made some 
form of education necessary, but confined educational advantages 
to male youths of proper birth. There was of course no purpose 
in educating any others.^ From Figure 4 it will be seen what a 
small percentage of the total population this included. Educa- 
tion in Greece was essentially the education of the children of the 
ruling class to perpetuate the rule of that class. 

Attica almost alone among the Greek States adopted anything 
approaching a liberal attitude toward the foreign-born ; in Sparta, 
and generally elsewhere in Greece, they were looked upon with 
deep suspicion. As a result most of the foreign residents of Greece 
were to be found in Athens, or its neighboring port city (the 
Piraeus), attracted there by the hospitality of the people and 
the intellectual or commercial advantages of these cities. After 
Athens had become the center of world thought, many foreigners 
took up their residence in the city because of the importance of its 
intellectual life. Foreigners, though, they remained up to 509 B.C. 
(See page 40.) Only rarely before this date, and then only for 
some conspicuous act of patriotism, and by special vote of the citi- 
zens, was a foreigner admitted to citizenship. Unlike Rome, which 
received those of alien birth freely into its citizenship, and opened 
up to them large opportunities of every kind, the Greeks persist- 
ently refused to assimilate the foreign-bom. Regarding them- 
selves as a superior people, descended from the gods, they held 
themselves apart rather exclusively as above other peoples. This 
kept the blood pure, but, from the standpoint of world usefulness, 
it was a serious defect in Greek Hfe.^ 

Beneath both citizens and foreign residents was a great founda- 
tion mass of working slaves, who rendered all types of menial and 
intellectual services. Sailors, household servants, field workers, 

^ Athens, however, permitted the children of foreigners to attend its schools, 
particularly in the later period of Athenian education. 

2 "When I compare the customs of the Greeks with these (the Romans), I can 
find no reason to extol either those of the Spartans, or the Thebans, or even of the 
Athenians, who value themselves the most for their wisdom; all who, jealous of their 
nobihty and communicating to none or to very few the privileges of their cities . . . 
were so far from receiving any advantage from this haughtiness that they became 
the greatest sufferers by it." (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Roman Antiguities, 
book II, chap, xvii.) 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 



21 



clerks in shops and offices, accountants, and pedagogues were 
among the more common occupations of slaves in Greece. Many 
of these had been citizens and learned 
men of other City-States or coimtries, 
but had been carried off as captives in 
some war. This was a common prac- 
tice in the ancient world, slavery being 
the lot of alien conquered people almost 
without exception. The composition of 
Attica, just before the outbreak of the 
Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.) is shown 
in Figure 4. The great number of 
slaves and foreigners is clearly seen, 
even though the citizenship had by this 
time been greatly extended. In Sparta 
and in other City-States somewhat 
similar conditions prevailed as to num- 
bers,^ but there the slaves (Helots) 
occupied a lower status than in Athens, 
being in reality serfs, tied to and being 
sold with the land, and having no rights 
which a citizen was bound to respect. 

Education, then, being only for the 
male children of citizens, and citizen- 
ship a degree to be attained to on the 
basis of education and training, let us 
next see in what that education consisted, and what were its most- 
prominent characteristics and results. 




Fig. 4. Distribution of the 

Population of Athens and 

Attica, about 430 b.c. 

(After Gulick) 



II. EARLY EDUCATION IN GREECE 

Some form of education that would train the son of the citizen 
for participation in the religious observances and duties of a citi- 
zen of the State, and would prepare the State for defense against 
outward enemies, was everywhere in Greece recognized as a public 
necessity, though its provision, nature, and extent varied in the 
different City-States. We have clear information only as to 
Sparta and Athens, and will consider only these two as types. 
Sparta is interesting as representing the old Greek tribal training, 

^ In Sparta the number of citizens was still less. At the time of the formulation 
of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus (about 850 B.C.) there were but 9000 
Spartan families in the midst of 250,000 subject people. This disproportion in- 
creased rather than diminished in later centuries. 



22 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

from which Sparta never progressed. Many of the other Greek 
City-States probably maintained a system of training much like 
that of Sparta. Such educational systems stand as undesirable 
examples of extreme state socialism, contributed little to our 
Western civilization, and need not detain us long. It was Athens, 
and a few other City-States which followed her example, which 
presented the best of Greece and passed on to the modern world 
what was most valuable for civilization. 

I . Education in Sparta 

The people. The system of training which was maintained in 
Sparta was in part a reflection of the character of the people, and 
in part a result of its geographical location. A warlike people by 
nature, the Spartans were for long regarded as the ablest fighters 
in Greece. Laconia, their home, was a plain surrounded by 
mountains. They represented but a small percentage of the total 
population, which they held in subjection to them by their mili- 
tary power. ^ The slaves (Helots) were often troublesome, and 
were held in check by many kinds of questionable practices. 
Education for citizenship with the Spartans meant education for 
usefulness in an intensely military State, where preparedness was 
a prerequisite to safety. Strength, courage, endurance, cunning, 
patriotism, and obedience were the virtues most highly prized, 
while the humane, literary, and artistic sentiments were ne- 
glected (R. i). Aristotle well expressed it when he said that 
" Sparta prepared and trained for war, and in peace rusted like a 
sword in its scabbard." 

The educational system. At birth the child was examined by 
a council of elders (R. i), and if it did not appear to be a promising 
child it was exposed to die in the mountains. If kept, the mother 
had charge of the child until seven if a boy, and still longer if a 
girl. At the beginning of the eighth year, and until the boy 
reached the age of eighteen, he lived in a public barrack, where he 
was given little except physical drill and instruction in the Spar- 
tan virtues. His food and clothing were scant and his bed hard. 
Each older man was a teacher. Running, leaping, boxing, wres- 
tling, mihtary music, military drill, ball-playing, the use of the 
spear, fighting, stealing, and laconic speech and demeanor con- 

' The Austrian-Magyar combination, which held together and dominated the 
many tribes of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, is an analogous modern situa- 
tion, though on a much larger scale. 



/ THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 23 

stituted the course of study. From eighteen to twenty was spent 
in professional training for war, and frequently the youth was 
publicly whipped to develop his courage and endurance. For the 
next ten years — ■ that is, until he was thirty years old — he was 
in the army at some frontier post. At thirty the young man was 
admitted to full citizenship and compelled to marry, though con- 
tinuing to live at the public barrack and spending his energies in 
training boys (R. i). Women and girls were given gymnastic 
training to make them strong and capable of bearing strong chil- 
dren. The family was virtually suppressed in the interests of 
defense and war.^ The intellectual training consisted chiefly in 
committing to memory the Laws of Lycurgus, learning a few 
selections from Homer, and listening to the conversation of the 
older men. 

As might naturally be supposed, Sparta contributed httle of 
anything to art, literature, science, philosophy, or government. 
She left to the world some splendid examples of heroism, as for 
example the sacrifice of Leonidas and his Spartans to hokl the pass 
at Thermopylae,^ and a warning example of the brutaHzing effect 
on a people of excessive devotion to military training. It is a 
pleasure to turn from this dark picture to the wonderful (for the 
time) educational system that was gradually developed at Athens. 

2. The old Athenian education 

Schools and teachers. Athenian education divides itself nat- 
urally into two divisions — the old Athenian training which pre- 
vailed up to about the time of the close of the Persian Wars 
(479 B.C.) and was an outgrowth of earMer tribal observances and 
practices, and later Athenian education, which characterized the 

1 Two Greek poems illustrate the Spartan mother, who was said to admonish hei 
sons to come back with their shields, or upon them. The first is: 
"Eight sons Daementa at Sparta's call 
Sent forth to fight: one tomb received them all. 
No tears she shed, but shouted, 'Victory! 
Sparta, I bore them but to die for thee.' " 



The second: 



"A Spartan, his companion slain, 
Alone from battle fled: 
His mother, kindling with disdain 
That she had borne him, struck him dead; 
For courage and not birth alone 
In Sparta testifies a son." 

"Go, tell at Sparta, thou that passest by, 
That here, obedient to her laws, we lie." 

(Epitaph on the three hundred who fell at Thermopyte.) 



24 HISTORY OF EDUCATIONf .. V. 

period of maximum greatness of Athens and afterward. We shall 
describe these briefly, in order. 

The state miHtary socialism of Sparta made no headway in 
more democratic Attica. The citizens were too individuahstic, 
and did their own thinking too well to permit the establishment 
of any such plan. While education was a necessity for citizen- 
ship, and the degree could not be obtained without it, the State 
nevertheless left every citizen free to make his own arrangements 
for the education of his sons, or to omit such education if he saw 
fit. Only instruction in reading, writing, music, and gymnastics 
were required. If f anaily pride, and the sense of obligation of a 
parent and a citizen were not sufficient to force the father to edu- 
cate his son, the son was then by law freed from the necessity of 
supporting his father in his old age. The State supervised edu- 
cation, but did not establish it. 

The t eacher s were private teachers, and derived their livelihood 
from fees. These naturally varied much with the kind of teacher 
and the wealth of the parent, much as private lessons in music or 
dancing do to-day. As was common in antiquity, the teachers 
occupied but a low social position (R. 5), and only in the higher 
schools of Athens was their standing of any importance. Greek 
literature contains many passages which show the low social 
status of the schoolmaster. ^ Schools were open from dawn to 
dark. The school discipline was severe, the rod being freely used 
both in the school and in the home. There were no Saturday 
and Sunday holidays or long vacations, such as we know, but 
about ninety festival and other state holidays served to break the 
continuity of instruction (R. 3). The schoolrooms were provided 
by the teachers, and were wholly lacking in teaching equipment, 
in any modem sense of the term. However, but little was needed. 
The instruction was largely individual instruction, the boy com- 
ing, usually in charge of an old slave known as a pedagogue, to re- 
_3r^ ceive or recite his lessons. The teaching process was essentially 
a telling and a leamin s-'b>''~h£ a . rt pro cedure. 

For the earlier years there were two schools which boys at- 

' An Athenian saying, of a man who was missing, was: "Either he is dead or has 
become a schoolmaster." To call a man a schoolmaster was to abuse him, according 
to Epicurus. Demosthenes, in his attack on ^Eschines, ridicules him for the fact that 
his father was a schoolmaster in the lowest type of reading and writing school. 
"As a boy," he says, "you were reared in abject poverty, waiting with your father 
on the school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, and doing 
the duty of a menial rather thani of a freeman's son." ! Lucian represents kings a 
. being forced to maintain themseves in hell by teaching reading and writing. 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 



25 



From sixteen to 




tended — the music and literary school, and a school for physical 
training. Boys probably spent part of the day at one school and 
part at the other, though this is not certain. They may have 
attended the two schools on alternate days. 
eighteen, if his parents were able, the boy 
attended a state-supported gymnasium, 
where an advanced type of physical train- 
ing was given. As this was preparatory for 
the next two years of army service, the 
gymnasia were supported by the State more 
as preparedness measures than as educa- 
tional institutions, though they partook of 
the nature of both. 

Early childhood. As at Sparta the in- 
fant was examined at birth, but the father, 
and not a council of citizens, decided 
whether or not it was to be "exposed" or 
preserved. Three ceremonies, of ancient 
tribal origin, marked the recognition and 
acceptance of the child. The first took 
place five days after birth, when the child 
was carried around the family hearth by the 
nurse, followed by the, household in procession. This ceremony, 
followed by a feast, was designed to place the child forever under 
the care of the family gods. On the tenth day the child was named 
by the father, who then formally recognized the child as his own 
and committed himself to its rearing and education. The third 
ceremony took place at the autumn family festival, when all chil- 
dren born during the preceding year were presented to the father's 
clansmen, who decided, by vote, whether or not the boy or girl 
was the legitimate and lawful child of Athenian parents. If 
approved, the child's name was entered on the registry of the 
clan, and he might then aspire to citizenship and inherit property 
from his parent (R. 4) . 

Up to the age of seven both boys and girls grew up together in 
the home, under the care of the nurse and mother, engaging in 
much the same games and sports as do children anywhere. From 
the first they were carefully disciplined for good behavior and for 
the establishment of self-control (R. 3), After the age of seven 
the boy and girl parted company in the matter of their education, 
the girl remaining closely secluded in the home (women and chil- 



Fic. 5. A Greek Boy 



26 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



dren were usually confined to the upper floor of the house) and 
being instructed in the household arts by her mother, while the 
boy went to different teachers for his education. Probably many 
girls learned to read and write from their mothers or nursesTand 
the daughters of well-to-do citizens learned to spin, weave, sew, and 
embroider. Music was also a common accomplishment of women. ^ 

The school of the grammatist. A Greek boy, unlike a mod- 
em school child, did not go to one teacher. Instead he had at 
least two teachers, and sometimes three. To the grammatist, who 
was doubtless an evolution from an earlier tribal scribe, he went 
to learn to read and write and count. The grammatist repre- 
sented the earliest or primary teacher. To the music teacher, 
who probably at first taught reading and writing also, he went 
for his instruction in music and literature. Finally, to the 
palcBstra he went for instruction in physical training (R. 3). 

Reading was taught by first learning the letters, then syllables, 

and finally words.- Plaques 

V''''5tN rr'l D Ob F i KA I TOJ Lti: 





on which 
was written, 



of baked earth 
the alphabet 

like the more modem* horn- 
book (see Figure 130), were 
frequently used.^ The ease 
with which modern children 
learn to read was unknown in 
Greece. Reading was very dif- 
ficult to learn, as accentuation, 
punctuation, spacing between 
words, and small letters had 
not as yet been introduced. 
As a result the study required 

^ Women were not supposed to possess any of the privileges of citizenship, be- 
longing rather to the alien class. They lived secluded lives, were not supposed to 
take any part in public affairs, and, if their husbands brought company to the house, 
they were expected to retire from view. In their attitude toward women the Greeks 
were an oriental rather than a modern or western people. 

2 "We learn first the names of the elements of speech, which are called grammata; 
then their shape and functions; then the syllables and their affections; lastly, the 
parts of speech, and the particular mutations connected with each, as inflection, 
number, contraction, accents, position in the sentence; then we begin to read and 
write, at first in syllables and slowly, but when we have attained the necessary cer- 
tainty, easily and quickly." (Dionysiusof Halicarnassus, Z)c Cow/'o.y. Verb.axp 25.) 

* Fragments of a tile found in Attica have stamped upon them the syllables ar, 
bar, gar; er, her, ger; etc. A bottle-shaped vase has also been found which, in addi- 
tion to the alphabet, contains pronouncing exercises as follows: 

bi-ba-bu-he zi-za-zu-ze pi-pa-pu-pe 

gi-ga-gn-ge mi-nia-mit-nie etc. 



MO 1 A lA P f < F n P YT ANE YC N E 6^-i 

i.-' E J<r PE t<fhA< O N T A A PA y /A/v 

/I r'l">A A KP FT A< IT fj 

Mc iiMHNO-s: TH I I Ffs 

-./r H :? y I \' 

Fig. 6. An Athenian Inscription 

A decree of the Council and Assembly, 
dating from about 450 B.C. Note the dii^- 
culty of trying to read, without any punc- 
tuation, and with only capital letters. 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 



27 




Fig. 7. Greek Writing-Materials 



much time,^ and much personal ingenuity had to be exercised 
in determining the meaning of a sentence. The inscription 
shown in Figure 6 will illustrate the difficulties quite well. 
The Athenian accent, too, was hard to acquire. 

The pupil learned to write 
by first tracing, with the I 
stylus, letters £ut in wax 
tablets, and later by copy- 
ing exercises set for him by 
his teacher, using the wax 
tablet and writing on his 
knee. Still later the pupil 

learned to write with ink on papyrus or parchment, though, due 
to the cost of parchment in ancient times, this was not greatly 
used. Slates and paper were of course unknown in Greece. 
There was little need for arithmetic, and but little was taught. 

Arithmetic such as we teach would 
have been impossible with their cum- 
brous system of notation.^ Only the 
elements of counting were taught, the 
Greek using his fingers or a counting- 
board, such as is shown in Figure 8, 
to do his simple reckoning. 

Great importance of reading and 
literature. After the pupil had learned 
to read, much attention was given to 
accentuation and articulation, in or- 
der to secure beautiful reading. Still 
more, in reading or reciting, the parts 
\Yere acted out. The Greeks were a 
nation of actors, and the recitations 
in the schools and the acting in the 
theaters gave plenty of opportunity 
for expression. There were no schoolbooks, as we know them. 
The master dictated, and the pupils wrote down, or, not uncom- 

^ "Learning to read must have been a difficult business in Hellas, for books were 
written only in capitals at this time. There were no spaces between the words, and 
no stops were inserted. Thus the reader had to exercise his ingenuity before he could 
arrive at the meaning of a sentence." (Freeman, K. J., Schools of Hellas, p. 87.) 

^ The Greeks had no numbers, but only words for numbers, and used the letters 
of the Greek alphabet with accents over them to indicate the words they knew as 
numbers. Counting and bookkeeping would of course be very difficult with such a 
system. 



Five 


Times 


Unity 




Thou 


Bands 




• •0 






Hun 


dreds 

999 




Te 


ns 




• 


• • 




Un 


its 







#••0 



Fig. 8 
A Greek Counting-Board 

Pebbles of different size or color 
were used for thousands, hun- 
dreds, tens, and units. Their 
position on the board gave them 
their values. The board now 
shows the total 15,379. 



28 HISTORY OF EDUCATION" 

monly, learned by heart what the master dictated. Ink and 
parchment were now used, the boy making his own schoolbooks. 
Homer was the first and the great reading book of the Greeks, 
the Iliad and the Odyssey being the Bible of the Greek people. 
-ThHrfollowed Hesiod, Theognis, the Greek poets, and the fables 
of i5isop.' Reading, declamation, and music were closely inter- 
related. To appeal to the emotions and to stir the will along 
moral and civic lines was a fundamental purpose of the instruc- 
tion (R. 5). A modern writer well characterizes the ancient 
instruction in literature in the following words: 

By making the works of the great poets of the Greek people the 
material of their education, the Athenians attained a variety of objects 
difficult of attainment by any other one means. The fact is, the an- 
cient poetry of Greece, with its finished form, its heroic tales and char- 
acters, its accounts of peoples far removed in time and space, its man- 
liness and pathos, its directness and siniplicity, its piety and wisdom, 
its respect for law and order, combined with its admiration for personal 
initiative and worth, furnished, in the hands of a careful and genial 
teacher, a material for a complete education such as could not well be 
matched even in our own day. What instruction in ethics, politics, 
social life, and manly bearing could not find a fitting vehicle in the 
Homeric poems, not to speak of the geography, the grammar, the 
literary criticism, and the history which the comprehension of them 
involved? Into what a wholesome, unsentimental, free world did these 
poems introduce the imaginative Greek boy! What splendid ideals 
of manhood and womanhood did they hold up for his admiration and 
imitation! From Hesiod he would learn all that he needed to know 
about his gods and their relation to him and his people. From the 
elegiac poets he would derive a fund of political and social wisdom, and 
an impetus to patriotism, which would go far to make him a good man 
and a good citizen. From the iambic poets he would learn to express 
with energy his indignation at meanness, feebleness, wrong, anc 
tyranny, while from the lyric poets he would learn the language suit- 
able to every genial feeling and impulse of the human heart. And in 
reciting or singing all these, how would his power of terse, idiomatic 
expression, his sense of poetic beauty and his ear for rhythm and 
music be developed ! With what a treasure of examples of every virtue 
and vice, and with what a fund of epigrammatic expression would his 
memory be furnished! How familiar he would be with the character 
and ideals of his nation, how deeply in sympathy with them! And all 

1 "These poems, especially Homer, Hesiod, and Theognis, served at the same 
time for drill in language and for recitation, whereby on the one hand the memory 
was developed and the imagination strengthened, and on the other the heroic forms 
of antiquity and healthy primitive utterances regarding morality, and full of homely 
common sense, were deeply engraved on the young mind. Homer was regarded 
not merely as a poet, but as an inspired moral teacher, and great portions of his 
poems were learned by heart. The Iliad and the Odyssey were in truth the Bible of 
the Greeks." (Laurie, S. S., Pre-Christian Education, p. 258.) 




A Lesson in Music and Language 

Explanation: At the right is the paidagogos; he is seated, and turns his head to look 
at his pupil, who is standing before his master. The hitter holds a writing-tablet 
and a stylus; he is perhaps correcting a task. At the left a pupil is taking a music 
lesson. On the wall are hung a roll of manuscript, a folded writing-tablet, a lyre, 
and an unknown cross-shaped object. 




A Lesson in Music and Poetry 

Explanation: At the right sits, cross-legged, the paidagogos, who has just brought 
in his pupil. The boy stands before the teacher of poetry and recites his lesson. 
The master, in a chair, holds in his hand a roll which he is unfolding, upon which 
we see Greek letters. Above these three figures we see on the wall a cup, a lyre, 
and a leather case of flutes. To the bag is attached the small box containing mouth- 
pieces of different kinds for the flutes. Farther on a pupil is receiving a lesson in 
music. The master and pupil are both seated on seats without backs. The master, 
with head erect, looks at the pupil who, bent over his lyre, seems absorbed in his 
y^laying. Above are hanging a basket, a lyre, and a cup. On the wall is an inscrip- 
tion in Greek. 



Fig. 9. An Athenian School 

From a cup discovered at Caere, signed by the painter Duris, and now in the 
Museum of Berlin) 



30 HISTORY OF EDUCATION • 

this was possible even before the introduction of letters. With this 
event a new era in education begins. The boy now not only learns 
and declaims his Homer, and sings his Simonides or Sappho; he learns 
also to write down their verses from dictation, and so at once to read 
and to write. This, indeed, was the way in which these two (to us) 
fundamental arts were acquired. As soon as the boy could trace with 
his finger in sand, or scratch with a stylus on wax, the forms of the 
letters, and combine them into syllables and words, he began to write 
poetry from his master's dictation. The writing-lesson of to-da}^ was 
the reading, recitation, or singing-lesson of to-morrow. Every boy 
made his own reading book, and, if he found it illegible, and stumbled 
in reading, he had only himself to blame. The Greeks, and especially 
the Athenians, laid the greatest stress on reading well, reciting well, 
and singing well, and the youth who could not do all three was looked 
upon as uncultured. Nor could he hide his want of culture, since 
young men were continually called upon, both at home and at more or 
less public gatherings, to perform their part in the social entertain- 
ment. ^ 

The music school. The teacher in this school gradually separ- 
ated himself from the grammatist, and often the two were found 
in adjoining rooms in the same school. In his functions he suc- 
ceeded the wandering poet or minstrel of earlier times. Music 
teachers were common in all the City-States of Greece. To this 
teacher the boy went at first to recite his poetry, and after the 
thirteenth year for a special music course. The teacher was 
known as a citharist, and the instrument usually used was the 
seven-stringed lyre. This resembled somewhat our modern guitar. 
The flute was also used somewhat, but never grew into much 
favor, partly because it tended to excite rather than soothe, and 
partly because of the contortions of the face to which its playing 
gave rise. Rhythm, melody7-aud_the feeling_for measure anc 
time were important in instruction, whose office was to soothe, 
purge, and harmonize man within and make him fit for moral 
instruction through the poetry with which their music was ever 
associated. Instead of being a distinct art, as with us, and taught 
by itself, music with the Greeks was always subsidiary to the 
expression of the spirit of their literature, and in aim it was for 
moral- training ends.^ Both Aristotle and Plato advocate state 

1 Davidson, Thos., Aristotle, pp. 73-75. 

2 Plutarch later expressed well the Greek conception of musical education in 
these words: "Whoever be he that shall give his mind to the study of music in his 
youth, if he meet with a musical education proper for the forming and regulating 
his inclinations, he will be sure to applaud and embrace that which is noble and gen- 
erous, and to rebuke and blame the contrary, as well in other things as in what 
belongs to music. And by that means he will become clear from all reproachful 
actions, for now having reaped the noblest fruit of music, he may be of great use. 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 



31 



control of school music to insure sound moral results. Inferior as 
their music was to present-day music, it exerted an influence over 
their lives which it is difficult for an American teacher to appreci- 
ate. 

The first lessons taught the use of the instrument, and the sim- 
ple chants of the religious services were learned. As soon as the 
pupil knew how to play, the master taught him to render the 
works of the great lyric poets of Greece. Poetry and music to- 





The Singing Lesson 

The boy is singing, to the accompani- 
ment of a flute. On the wall hangs a 
bag of flutes. 

Fig. 10. Greek School Lessons 



The Literature Lesson 

The boy is reciting, while the teacher 
follows him on a roll of manuscript. 



gether thus formed a single art. At thirteen a special music 
course began which lasted until sixteen, but which only the sons 
of the more well-to-do citizens attended. Every boy, though, 
learned some music, not that he might be a musician, but that he 
might be musical and able to perform his part at social gatherings 
and participate in the religious services of the State. Profes- 
sional playing was left to slaves and foreigners, and was deemed 
unworthy a free man and a citizen. Professionalism in either 
music or athletics was regarded as disgraceful. The purpose of. 
both activities was harmonious personal development, which the 
Greeks believed contributed to moral worth. \ 

The palaestra; gymnastics. Very unlike our modem educa- 
tion, fully one half of a boy's school life, from eight to sixteen, was 
given to sports and games in another school under different teach- 
not only to himself, but to the commonwealth; while music teaches him to abstain 
from everything that is indecent, both in word and deed, and to observe decorum, 
temperance, and regularity." (Monroe, Paul, History of Education, p. 92.) 



/ 



32 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ers, known as the palcEstra. The work began gradually, but by 
fifteen had taken precedence over other studies. As in music, 
harmonious physical development and moral ends were held to 
be of fundamental importance. The standards of success were 
far from our modern standards. To win the game was of little 
significance; the important thing was to do the part gracefully 
and, for the person concerned, well. To attain to a graceful and 
dignified carriage of the body, good physical health, perfect con- 
trol of the temper, and to develop quickness of perception, self- 
possession, ease, and skill in the games were the aims — not mere 
strength or athletic prowess (R. 2). Only a few were allowed to 
train for participation in the Olympian games. 

The work began with children's games, contests in running, and 
ball games of various kinds. J^eportment • — how to get up, walk, 
sit, and how to achieve easy manners — was taught by the mas- 
ters. After the pupils came to be a little older there was a definite 
course of study, which included, in succession: (i) leaping and 
jumping, for general bodily and lung development; (2) running 
contests, for agility and endurance; (3) throwing the discus,^ for 
arm exercise; (4) casting the javelin, for bodily poise and coordi- 
nation of movement, as well as for future use in hunting ; (5) boxing 
and wrestling, for quickness, agility, endurance, and the control of 
the temper and passions. Swimming and dancing were also in- 
cluded for all, dancing being a slow and graceful movement of the 
body to music, to develop grace of motion and beauty of form, and 
to exercise the whole human being, body and soul. The minuet 
and some of our folk-dancing are our nearest approach to the 
Greek type of dancing, though still not like it. The modern part- 
ner dance was unknown in ancient Greece. 

The exercises were performed in classes, or in small groups. 
They took place in the open air, and on a dirt or sandy floor. 
They were accompanied by music — usually the flute, played by 
ia paid performer. A number of teachers looked after the boys, 
.examining them physically, supervising the exercises, directing 
the work, and giving various forms of instruction. 

The gymnasial training, sixteen to eighteen. Up to this point 
the education provided was a private and a family affair. In the 
home and in the school the boy had now been trained to be a gen- 
tleman, to revere the gods, to be moral and upright according to 
Greek standards, and in addition he had been given that training 

^ Aflat circle of polished bronze, or other metal, eight or nine inches in diameter. 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 



33 



in reading, writing, music, and athletic exercises that the State 
required parents to furnish. It is certain that many boys, whose 
parents could ill afford further expense for schooling, were allowed 
to quit the schools at from thirteen to fifteen. Those who ex- 
pected to become full citizens, however, and to be'aTpaJt ofthe 
government and hold olhce, were required to continue until 
twenty years of age. Two years more were spent in schooling, 
largely athletic, and two years additional in military service. Of 
this additional training, if his parents chose and could afford it, 
the State now took control. 




¥jIJ/f^///J/^^/N/ir//)>>>ii,,iu,i„,, ,,,,„,,,,,„,,, t>iini<rf/A»,)i> n.i»>,}>>>nif/ ^ 

Fig. II. Ground-Plan of the Gymnasium 
AT Ephesos, in Asia Minor 

Explanation: A, B, C, pillared corridors, or portico; D, an 
open space, possibly a palaestra, evidently intended to supply 
the peristylium; E, a long, narrow hall used for games of ball; 
F, a large hall with seats; G, in which was suspended a sack 
filled with chaff for the use of boxers; H, where the young men 
sprinkled themselves with dust; /, the cold bath; A', where the 
wrestling-master anointed the bodies of the contestants; L, 
the cooling-off room; M, the furnace-room; N, the vapor bath; 
0, the dry-sweating apartment; P, the hot bath; Q, Q', rooms 
for games, for the keepers, or for other uses; R, R', covered 
stadia, for use in bad weather; S, S, S, S, S, rows of seats, look- 
ing upon T, the uncovered stadium; U, groves, with seats and 
walks among the trees; V, V, recessed seats for the use of 
philosophers, rhetoricians^ and others. 



34 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

For the years from sixteen to eighteen the boy attended-a state 
gymnasium, of which two were erected outside of Athens by the 
State, in groves of trees, in 590 B.C. Others were erected later in 
other parts of Greece. Figure 1 1 shows the ground plan of one of 
these gymnasia, and a study of the explanation of the plan will re- 
veal the nature of these estabhshments. The boy now had for 
teachers a number of gymnasts of ability. The old exercises of 
the palcestra were continued, but running, wrestling, and boxing 
were much emphasized. The youth learned to run in armor, 
while wrestling and boxing became more severe. He also learned 
to ride a horse, to drive a chariot, to sing and dance in the public 
choruses, and to participate in the public state and religious 
processions. 

Still more, the youth now passed from the supervision of a fam- 
ily pedagogue to the supervision of the State. For the first time 
in his life he was now free to go where he desired about the city; 
to frequent the streets, market-place, and theater; to listen to 
debates and jury trials, and to witness the great games; and to 
mix with men in the streets and to mingle somewhat in public 
affairs. He saw little of girls, except his sisters, but formed deep 
friendships with other young men of his age.^ Aside from a re- 
quirement that he learn the laws of the State, his education during 
this period was entirely physical and civic. If he abused his Hb- 
erty he was taken in hand by public officials charged with the 
supervision of public morals. He was, however, still regarded as 
a minor, and his father (or guardian) was held responsible for his 
public behavior. 

The citizen-cadet years, eighteen to twenty. The supervision 
of the State during the preceding two years had in a way been 
joint with that of his father; now the State took complete control. 
At the age of eighteen his father took him before the proper au- 
thorities of his district or ward in the city, and presented him as a 
candidate for citizenship. He was examined morally and physi- 
cally, and if sound, and if the records showed that he was the 
legitimate son of a citizen, his name was entered on the register of 

^ "There were no home influences in Hellas. The men-folk lived out of doors. 
The young Athenian from his sixth year onward spent his whole day away from 
home, in the company of his contemporaries, at school or palaestra, or in the streets. 
When he came home there was no home life. His mother was a nonentity, living 
in the woman's apartments; he probably saw little of her. His real home was the 
palaestra, his companions his contemporaries and his paidagogos. He learned to 
disassociate himself from his family and associate himself with his fellow citizens. 
No doubt he lost much by this system, but the solidarity of the State gained-" 
(Freeman, K. J., Schools of Hellas, p. 2S2.) 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 35 

his ward as a prospective member of it (R. 4). His long hair was 
now cut, he donned the black garb of the citizen, was presented to 
the people along with others at a pubhc ceremony, was publicly 
armed with a spear and a shield, and then, proceeding to one 
of the shrines of the city, on a height overlooking it, he solemnly 
took_the^.p,hehic -oath : 

I will never disgrace these sacred arms, nor desert my companion 
in the ranks. I will fight for temples and public property, both alone 
and with many. I will transmit my fatherland, not only not less, but 
greater and better, than it was transmitted to me. I will obey the 
magistra tes who may at any time be in power. I will observe both the 
existing laws and those which the people may unanimously hereafter 
make, and, if any person seek to annul the laws or to set them at 
naught, I will do my best to prevent him, and will defend them both 
alone and with many. I will honor the religion of my fathers. And 
I call to witness Aglauros, Enyalios, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, and 
Hegemone. 

He was now an Ephebos, or citizen-cadet, with still two years of 
severe training ahead of him before he could take up the full 
duties of citizenship. The first year he spent in and near Athens, 
learning to be a soldier. He did what recruits do almost every- 
where — drill, camp in the open, learn the army methods and dis- 
cipline, and march in public processions and take part in religious 
festivals. This first year was much like that of new troops in camp 
being worked into real soldiers. At the end of the year there was 
a public drill and inspection of the cadets, after which they were 
sent to the frontier. It was now his business to come to know his 
country thoroughly — Jts^topqgraphy, roads, springs, seashores, 
and mountain passes. He also assisted in enforcing law and order 
throughout the country districts, as a sort of a state constabulary 
or rural police. At the end of this second year of practical train- 
ing the second examination was held, the cadet was now admitted 
to full citizenship, and passed to the ranks of a trained citizen in 
the reserve army of defense, as does a boy in Switzerland to-day 

(R. 4). 

Results under the old Greek system. Such was the educa- 
tional system which was in time evolved from the earlier tribal 
practices of the citizens of old Athens. If we consider Sparta as 
representing the earlier tribal education of the Greek peoples, we 
see how far the Athenians, due to their wonderful ability to make 
progress, were able to advance beyond this earlier type of prepa- 
ration for citizenship (R. 5). Not only did Athens surpass all 



36 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Greece, but, for the first time in the history of the world, we find 
rhere, expressing itself in the education of the young, the modern 
^ western, individualistic and democratic spirit, as opposed to the 
deadening caste and governmental systems of the East. Here first 
we find a free people living under political conditions which favored 
liberty, culture, and intellectual growth, and using their liberty 
to advance the culture and the knowledge of the people (R. 6). 
•^ Here also we find, for the first time, the thinkers of the State 
\ deeply concerned with the education of the youth of the State, 
and viewing education as a necessity to make life worth living and 
, secure the State from dangers, both within and without. To pre- 
pare men by a severe but simple and honest training to fear the 
gods, to do honest work,, to despise comfort and vice, to obey the 
laws, to respect their neighbors and themselves, and to reverence 
the wisdom of their race, was the aim of this old education. The 
schooling for citizenship was rigid, almost puritanical, but it pro- 
duced wonderful results, both in peace and in war.^ Men thus 
trained guided the destinies of Athens during some two centuries, 
and the despotism of the East as represented by Persia could not 
defeat them at Marathon, Salamis, and Platasa. 

The simple and effective curriculum. The simplicity of the 
curriculum was one of its marked features. In a manner seldom 
witnessed in the world's educational history, the Greeks used 
their religion, literature, government, and the natural activities 
of young men to impart an education of wonderful effectiveness.^ 
The subjects we have valued so highly for training were to them 
unknown. They taught no arithmetic or grammar, no science, 
no drawing, no higher mathematics, and no foreign tongue. 
Music, the literature and religion of their own people, careful 
physical training, and instruction in the duties and practices of 
citizenship constituted the entire curriculum. 

^ "No doubt the Athenian public was by no means so learned as we moderns are; 
they were ignorant of many sciences, of much history, — in short of a thousand 
results of civilization which have since accrued. But in civilization itself, in mental 
power, in quickness of comprehension, in correctness of taste, in accuracy of judg- 
ment, no modern nation, however well instructed, has been able to equal by labored 
acquirements the inborn genius of the Greeks." (MahafTy, J. P., Old Greek Education.) 

^ The great institutions of the Greek City-State were in themselves highly educa- 
tive. The chief of these were: 

1. The Assembly, where the laws were proposed, debated, and made. 

2. The Juries, on which citizens sat and where the laws were applied. 

3. The Theater, where the great masterpieces of Greek literature were performed. 

4. The Olympian and other Games, which were great religious ceremonies of a 
literary as well as an athletic and artistic character, and to which Greeks from 
all over Hellas came. 

5. The city life itself, among an inquisitive, imaginative, and disputatious people. 



THE OLD GREEK EDUCATION 37 

_lt-EKas an education by doing; not one of learning .from books. 
That it was an attractive type of education there is abundant 
testimony by the Greeks themselves. We have not as yet come 
to value physical education as did the Greeks, nor are we nearly 
so successful in our moral education, despite the aid of the Chris- 
tian religion which they did not know. It was, to be sure , class 
education, and hmited to but a small fraction of the total popu- 
lation. In it girls had no share. There were many features of 
Greek life, too, that are repugnant to modem conceptions. Yet, 
despite these limitations, the old education of Athens still stands 
as one of the most successful in its results of any system of edu- 
cation which has been evolved in the history of the world. Con- 
sidering its time and place in the history of the world and that it 
was a development for which there were nowhere any precedents, 
it represented a very wonderful evolution. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Why are imaginative ability and many-sided natures such valuable 
characteristics for any people? 

2. Why is the abihty to make progressive changes, possessed so markedly 
by the Athenian Greeks, an important personal or racial character- 
istic? 

3. Are the Athenian characteristics, stated in the middle of page 19, charac- 
teristics capable of development by training, or are they native, or 
both? 

4. How do you explain the Greek failure to achieve political unity? 

5. Would education for citizenship with us to-day possess the same defects 
as in ancient Greece? Why? Do we give an equivalent training? 

6. Which is the better attitude for a nation to assume toward the foreigner 
— the Greek, or the American? Why? 

7. Why does a state mihtary socialism, such as prevailed at Sparta, tend 
to produce a people of mediocre intellectual capacity? 

8. How do you account for the Athenian State leaving literary and musical 
education to private initiative, but supporting state gymnasia? 

9. Would the Athenian method of instruction have been possible had all 
children in the State been given an education? Why? 

10. How did the education of an Athenian girl differ from that of a girl in 
the early American colonies? 

11. Why did the Greek boy need three teachers, whereas the American boy 
is taught all and more by one primary teacher? 

12. Contrast the Greek method of instruction in music, and the purposes 
of the instruction, with our own. 

13. How could we incorporate into our school instruction some of the im- 
portant aspects of Greek instruction in music? 

14. What do you think of the contentions of Aristotle and Plato that the 
State should control school music as a means of securing sound moral 
instruction? 

15. Does the Greek idea that a harmonious personal development contrib 
utes to moral worth appeal to you? Why? 



38 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

1 6. Contrast the Greek ideal as to athletic training with the conception of 
athletics held by an average American schoolboy. 

17. Contrast the education of a Greek boy at sixteen with that of an Ameri- 
can boy at the same age. 

18. Contrast the emphasis placed on expression as a method in teaching in 
the schools of Athens and of the United States. 

19. Do the needs of modern society and industrial life warrant the greater 
emphasis we place on learning from books, as opposed to the learning 
by doing of the Greeks? 

20. Compare the compulsory-school period of the Greeks with our own. 
If we were to add some form of compulsory miHtary training, for all 
youths between eighteen and twenty, and as a preparedness measure, 
would we approach still more nearly the Greek requirements? 

21. Explain how the Athenian Greeks reconciled the idea of social service to 
the State with the idea of individual liberty, through a form of education 
which developed personahty. Compare this with our American ideal. 

22. The Greek schoolboy had no long summer vacation, as do American 
children. Is there any special reason whv we need it more than did 
they? 

23. Do we believe that virtue can be taught in the way the Hellenic peoples 
did? Do we carry such a belief into practice? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

1. Plutarch: Ancient Education in Sparta. 

2. Plato: An Athenian Schoolboy's Life. 

3. Lucian: An Athenian Schoolboy's Day. 

4. Aristotle: Athenian Citizenship and the Ephebic Years. 

5. Freeman: Sparta and Athens compared. 

6. Thucydides: Athenian Education summarized. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Describe and characterize the Laws which Lycurgus framed for Spartan 
training (i). 

2. Describe and characterize the instruction of the Irens at Sparta. Com- 
pare with the training given among the best of the American Indian 
tribes (i). 

3. Contrast the type of education given an Athenian and a Spartan boy, 
as to nature and purpose and character (i and 2). 

4. What degree of State supervision of education is indicated by Plato (2)? 
By Freeman (5)? 

5. Compare an Athenian school day as described by Lucian (3) with a 
school day in a modern Gary-type school. 

6. Compare the Ephebic years of an Athenian youth (4) with those of a 
Spartan youth (i). 

7. What were some of the chief defects of Athenian schools (5)? 

8. What was the position of the State in the matter of the education of 
youth (5)? 

9. What were the great merits of the Athenian educational and political 
system of training (6) ? 

(For Supplemental References, see following chapter.) 



CHAPTER 11 
LATER GREEK EDUCATION 

III. THE NEW GREEK EDUCATION 

Political events: The Golden Age of Greece. The Battle of 
Marathon (490 B.C.) has long been considered one of the "decisive 
battles of the world." Had the despotism of the East triumphed 
here, and in the subsequent campaign that ended in the defeat of 
the Persian fleet at Salamis (480 B.C.) and of the Persian army at 
Plataea (479 B.C.), the whole history of our western world would 
have been different. The result of the war with Persia was the 
triumph of this new western democratic civilization, prepared 
and schooled for great national emergencies by a severe but effec- 
tive training, over the uneducated hordes led to battle by the au- 
tocracy of the East. This was the first, but not the last, of the 
many battles which western democracy and civihzation has had 
to fight to avoid being crushed by autocracy and despotism. 
Marathon broke the dread spell of the Persian name and freed the 
more progressive Greeks to pursue their intellectual and pohtical 
development. Above all it revealed the strength and power of the 
Athenians to themselves, and in the half century following the most 
wonderful political, literary, and artistic development the world 
had ever known ensued, and the highest products of Greek civili- 
zation were attained. Attica had braved everything for the com- 
mon cause of Greece, even to leaving Athens to be burned by the 
invader, and for the next fifty years she held the position of politi- 
cal as well as cultural preeminence among the Greek City-States. 
Athens now became the world center of wealth and refinement 
and the home of art and literature (R. 7), and her influence along 
cultural lines, due in part to her mastery of the sea and her grow- 
ing commerce, was now extended throughout the Mediterranean 
world. 

From 479 to 431 B.C. was the Golden Age of Greece, and '' dur- 
ing this short period Athens gave birth to more great men — 
poets, artists, statesmen, and philosophers — than all the world 
beside had produced ^ in any period of equal length." Then, 

^ The culmination came in what is known as the Age of Pericles, who was the 
master mind at Athens from 450 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such 



40 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

largely as a result of the growing jealousy of military Sparta, 
came that cruel and vindictive civil strife, known as the Pelopon- 
nesian War, which desolated Greece, left Athens a wreck of her 
former self, permanently lowered the moral tone of the Greek peo- 
ple, and impaired beyond recovery the intellectual and artistic life 
of Hellas. For many centuries Athens continued to be a center of 
intellectual achievement, and to spread her culture throughout a 
new and a different world, but her power as a State had been im- 
paired forever by a revengeful war between those who should have 
been friends and allies in the cause of civilization. 

Transition from the old to the new. As early as 509 B.C. a new 
constitution had admitted all the free inhabitants of Attica to 
citizenship, and the result was a rapid increase in the prestige, 
property, and culture of Athens. Citize nship wa snow open to 
the commercial_classes^nd no longer restricted to a small, prop- 
erly born, and properly educated class. Wealth now became im- 
portant in giving leisure to the citizen, and was no longer looked 
down upon as it had been in the earlier period. After the Pelo- 
ponnesian War the predominance of Attica among the Greek 
States, the growth of commerce, the constant interchange of em- 
bassies, the travel overseas of Athenian citizens, and the presence 
of many foreigners in the State all alike led to a tolerance of new 
ideas and a criticism of old ones which before had been unknown. 
A leisure class now arose, and personal interest came to have a 
larger place than before, with a consequent change in the earlier 
conceptions as to the duty of the citizen to the State. Literature 
lost much of its earlier religious character, and the religious basis 
of morality ^ began to be replaced by that of reason. Philosophy 
was now called upon to furnish a practical guide for life to replace 
the old religious basis. A new philosophy in which "man was the 
measure of all things" arose, and its teachers came to have large 
followings. The old search for an explanation of the world of 
matter ^ was now replaced by an attempt to explain the world of 
ideas and emotions, with a resulting evolution of the sciences of 

names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, 
Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and 
Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, graced Athens. 

1 With the Greeks, morality and the future life never had any connection. 

^ The early Greek philosophers tried to explain the physical world about them by 
trying to discover what they called the "first principle," from which all else had 
been derived. Thales (c. 624-548 B.C.), the father of Greek science, had concluded 
that water was the original source of all matter; Anaximenes (c. 588-524 B.C.), that 
air was the first principle; Heraclites (c. 525-475 B.C.), fire; and Pythagoras (c. 580- 
500 B.C.), number. 



LATER GREEK EDUCATION 41 

philosophy, ethics, and logic. It was a period of great intellectual 
as well as political change and expansion, and in consequence the 
old education, which had answered well the needs of a primitive 
and isolated community, now found itself but poorly adapted to 
meet the larger needs of the new cosmopolitan State. ^ The result 
was a material change in the old education to adapt it to the needs 
of the new Athens, now become the intellectual center of the 
civilized world. 

Changes in the old education. A number of changes in the 
character of the old education were now gradually introduced. 
The rigid drill of the earlier period began to be replaced by an 
easier and a more pleasurable t>-pe of training. Gymnastics for 
personal enjoyment began to replace drill for the service of the 
State, and was much less rigid in type. The old authors, who had 
rendered important service in the education of youth, began to be 
replaced by more modem writers, with a distinct loss of the earlier 
religious and moral force. New musical instruments, giving a 
softer and more pleasurable effect, took the place of the seven- 
stringed lyre, and complicated music replaced the simple Doric 
airs of the earlier period. Education became m uch more indi- 
vidual, literary, and theoretical. Geometry and drawing were 
introduced as new studies. Grammar and rhetoric began to be 
studied, discussion was introduced, and a certain gHbness of 
speech began to be prized. The citizen-cadet years, from sixteen 
to twenty, formerly devoted to rather rigorous physical training, 
were now changed to school work of an intellectual tj'pe. 

New teachers ; the Sophists. New teachers, known as Sophists, 
who professed to be able to train men for a political career,^ began 
to offer a more practical course design ed to prep areboysJor_the 

^ "There was now demanded ability to discuss all sorts of social, political, eco- 
nomic, and scientific or metaphysical questions; to argue in public in the market- 
place or in the law courts; to declaim in a formal manner on almost any topic; to 
amuse or even instruct the populace upon topics of interest or questions of the day; 
to take part in the many diplomatic embassies and political missions of the times — 
the ability, in fact, to shine in a democratic society much like our own and to con- 
trol the votes and command the approval of an intelligent populace where the 
function of printing-press, telegraph, railroad, and all modem means of communica- 
tion were performed through public speech and private discourse, and where the 
legal, ecclesiastical, and other professional classes of teachers did not exist." (Mon- 
roe, Paul, History of Education, pp. 109-10.) 

2 The importance of a political career in the new Athens will be better vmder- 
stood if we remember that the influence on public opinion to-day exerted by the 
pulpit, bar, public platform, press, and scholar was then concentrated in the public 
speaker, and that the careers now open to promising youths in science, industry, 
commerce, politics, and government were then concentrated in the political career. 
It must also be remembered that the Greeks had always been a nation of speakers, 
Wth the content and the form of the address being important. 



42 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

newer type of state service. These in time drew many Ephebe-? 
into their private schools, where the chief studies were on the 
content, form, and practical use of the Greek language. Rhetoric 
and grammar before long became the master studies of this new 
period, as they were felt to prepare boys better for the new politi- 
cal and intellectual life of Hellas than did the older type of train- 
ing. In the schools of the Sophists boys now spent their time in 
forming phrases, choosing words, examining grammatical struc- 
ture, and learning how to secure rhetorical effect. Many of these 
new teachers made most extravagant claims for their instruction 
(R. 8) and drew much ridicule from the champions of the older 
type of education, but within a century they had thoroughly es- 
tablished themselves, and had permanently changed the character 
of the earlier Greek education. 

By 350 B.C. we find that Greek. school education had been 
differentiated into three divisions, as follows: 

1. Primary education, covering the years from seven or eight to 
thirteen, and embracing reading, writing, arithmetic, and chant- 
ing. The teacher of this school came to be known as a grani- 
malist. 

2. Secondary education, covering the years from thirteen to sixteen, 
and embracing geometry, drawing, and a special music course. 
Later on some grammar and rhetoric were introduced into this 
school. The teacher of this school came to be known as a gram- 
maticus. 

3. Higher or university education, covering the years after sixteen. 

The flood of individualism. This period of artistic and intel- 
lectual brilliancy of Greece following the Peloponnesian War 
marked the beginning of the end of Greece politically. The war 
was a blow to the strength of Greece from which the different 
States never recovered. Greece was bled white by this needless 
civil strife. The tendencies toward individualism in education 
were symptomatic of tendencies in all forms of social and politica) 
life. The philosophers — Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle — 
proposed ideal remedies for the evils of the State, ^ J3ut in vain. 
The old ideal of citizenship died out. Service to the State be- 

' Each of these philosophers proposed an ideal educalional system designed to 
remedy the evils of the State. Xenophon (c. 410-362 B.C.), in his Cyropcrdia, pur- 
porting to describe the education of Cyrus of Persia, proposed a Spartan modifica' 
tion of the old Athenian system. Plato (429-348 B.C.), in his Republic, proposed an 
aristocratic socialism as a means of securing individual virtue and state justice. Ht 
first presents the super-civic man, an ideal destined for great usefulness among the 
Christians later on. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), in his Ethics, and in his PoliUcs, out- 
lined an ideal state and a system of education for it. 



LATER GREEK EDUCATION 43 

came purely subordinate to personal pleasure and advancement. 
Irreverence and a scoffing attitude became ruling tendencies. 
Family morality decayed. The State in time became corrupt and 
nerveless. Finally, in 338 B.C., Philip of Macedon became master 
of Greece, and annexed it to the world empire which he and his 
son Alexander created. Still later, in 146 B.C., the new world 
power to the west, Rome, conquered Greece and made of it a 
Roman province. 

Though dead politically, there now occurred the unusual spec- 
tacle of "captive Greece taking captive her rude conqueror," and 
spreading Greek art, literature, philosophy, science, and Greek 
ideas throughout the Mediterranean world. It was the Greek 
higher learning that now became predominant and exerted such 
great influence on the future of our world civilization. It remains 
now to trace briefly the development and spread of this higher 
learning, and to point out how thoroughly it modified the thinking 
of the future. 

New schools ; Socrates. In the beginning each Sophist teacher 
was a free lance, and taught what he would and in the manner 
he thought best. Many of them made extraordinary efforts to 
attract students and win popular approval and fees. Plato repre- 
sents the Sophist Protagoras as saying, with reference to a youth 
ambitious for success in political life, "If he comes to me he will 
learn that which he comes to learn." At first the instruction was 
largely individual, but later classes were organized. Isocrates, 
who lived from 436 to 338 B.C., organized the instruction for the 
first time into a well-graded sequence of studies, with definite aims 
and work (R. 8). He shifted the emphasis in instruction from 
training for success in argumentation, to training to think clearly 
and to express ideas properly. His pupils were unusually success- 
ful, and his school did much to add to the fame of Athens as an 
intellectual center. From his work sprang a large number of so 
called Rhetorical Schools, much like our better private schools 
and academies, offering to those Ephebes who could afTord to 
attend a very good preparation for participation in the public life 
of the period. 

In contrast with the Sophists, a series of schools of philosophy 
also arose in Athens. These in a way were the outgrowth of the 
work of Socrates. Accepting the Sophists' dictum that "man is 
the measure of all things," he tried to turn youths from the baser 
individualism of the Sophists of his day to the larger general 



44 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



truths which measure the life of a true man. In particular he 
tried to show that the greatest of all arts — the art of living a good 
life — called for correct individual thinking and a knowledge of 
the right. " Know thyself " was his great guiding principle. His 
emphasis was on the problems of everyday morality. Frankly 
accepting the change from the old education as a change that 
could not be avoided, he sought to formulate a new basis for edu- 
cation in personal morality and virtue, and as a substitute for the 
old training for service to the State. He taught by conversation, 
engaging men in argument as he met them in the street, and show- 
ing to them their ignorance (R. 9). Even in Athens, where free 
jpeech was enjoyed more than anywhere else in the world at that 
time, such a shrewd questioner would 
naturally make enemies, and in 399 B.C. 
at the age of seventy-one, he was con- 
demned to death by the Athenian popu- 
lace on the charge of impiety and corrupt- 
ing the youth of Athens. 

Socrates' greatest disciple was a citizen 
of wealth by the name of Plato, who had 
abandoned a political career for the charms 
of philosophy, and to him we owe our 
chief information as to the work and aims 
of Socrates.' In 386 B.C. he founded the 
Academy, where he passed almost forty 
years in lecturing and writing. His school, 
which formed a model for others, consisted 
of a union of teachers and students who 
possessed in common a chapel, hbrary, lecture-rooms, and living- 
rooms. Philosophy, mathematics, and science were taught, and 
women as well as men were admitted. 

Other schools of importance in Athens were the Lyceum, 
founded in 335 B.C. by a foreign-bom pupil of Plato's by the name 
of Aristotle, who did a remarkable work in organizing the known 
knowledge of his time; ^ the school of the Stoics, founded by Zeno 
in 308 B.C. ; and the school of the Epicureans, founded by Epicurus 
in 306 B.C. Each of these schools offered a philosophical solution 

1 "It is bej'-ond all conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, 
observed." (Goethe.) 

"One of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses that has ever appeared — 
a, man beside whom no age has an equal to place." (Hegel.) 

"Aristotle, Nature's private secretary, dipping his pen in intellect." (Eusebius.) 




Fig. 12 
Socrates (469-399 b.c.) 

(After a marble bust in the 
Vatican Gallery, at Rome) 



LATER GREEK EDUCATION 



45 



of the problem of life, and Plato and Aristotle wrote treatises on 
education as well. Each school evolved into a form of religious 
brotherhood which perpetuated the organization after the death 
of the master. In time these became largely schools for expound- 
ing the philosophy of the founder. 

The University of Athens. Coincident with the founding of 
these schools and the political events we have previously recorded, 
certain further changes in Athenian education were taking place. 
The character of the changes in the education before the age of 
sixteen we have described. As a result in part of the development 
of the schools of the Sophists, which were in themselves only 





SOPHISTS 


^ 




^nCt2^t^ 


5th C. B,C. 


"^i^... 












*^^|-\^ 


PHILOSOPHICAL 
SCHOOLS 

386-306 B.C. 






RHETORICAL 
SCHOOLS 

4th and 3rd Cs. B.C. 












^^ 




UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS 
About 200 B.C. 





Fig. 13. Evolution op the Greek University 



attempts to meet fundamental changes in Athenian life, the edu- 
cation of youths after sixteen tended to become literary, rather 
than physical and military. The Ephebic period of service (from 
eighteen to twenty) was at first reduced from two years to one, 
and after the Macedonian conquest, in 338 B.C., when there was 
no longer an Athenian State to serve or protect, the entire period 
of training was made optional. The Ephebic corps was now 
opened to foreigners, and in time became merely a fashionable 
semi-military group. Instead of the military training, attendance 
at the lectures of the philosophical schools was now required, and 
attendance at the rhetorical schools was optional. Later the 
philosophical schools were granted public support by the Athe- 
nian Assembly, professorships were created over which the Assem- 
bly exercised supervision, the rhetorical and philosophical schools 
were gradually merged, the study years were extended from two to 
six, or seven, a form of university Hfe as regards both students and 



46 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

professors was developed, and what has since been termed "The 
University of Athens" was evolved. Figure 13 shows how this 
evolution took place. 

As Athens lost in political power her citizens turned their atten- 
tion to making their city a center of world learning. This may be 
said to have been accompHshed by 200 B.C. Though Greece had 
long since become a Macedonian province, and was soon to pass 
under the control of Rome, the so-called University of Athens was 
widely known and much frequented for the next three hundred 
years, and continued in existence until finally closed, as a center 
-of pagan thought, by the edict of the Roman-Christian Emperor, 
Justinian, in 529 a.d. Though reduced to the rank of a Roman 
provincial town, Athens long continued to be a city of letters and 
a center of philosophic and scientific instruction. 

Spread and influence of Greek higher education. Alexander 
'the Great rendered a very important service in uniting the west- 
■em Orient and the eastern Mediterranean into a common world 
•empire, and in establishing therein a common language, literature, 
philosophy, a common interest, and a common body of scientific 
knowledge and law. It was his hope to create a new empire, in 
which the distinction between European and Asiatic should pass 
•away. No less than seventy cities were established with a view 
to holding his empire together. These served to spread Hellenic 
'Culture. Greek schools, Greek theaters, Greek baths, and Greek 
institutions of every type were to be found in practically all of 
them, and the Greek tongue was heard in them all. With Alex- 
ander the Great the history of Greek life, culture, and learning 
merges into that of the history of the ancient world. Everywhere 
throughout the new empire Greek philosophers and scientists, 
architects and artists, merchants and colonists, followed behind 
the Macedonian armies, spreading Greek civilization and becom- 
ing the teachers of an enlarged world. ^ " Greek cities stretched 
from the Nile to the Indus, and dotted the shores of the Black and 
the Caspian seas. The Greek language, once the tongue of a 
petty people, grew to be a universal language of culture, spoken 
even by barbarian lips, and the art, the science, the literature, 
the principles of politics" and philosophy, developed in isolation 

^ "As Alexander passed conquering through Asia, he restored to the East, as 
garnered grain, that Greek civiHzation whose seeds had long ago been received from 
the East. Each conqueror in turn, the Macedonian and the Roman bowed before 
conquered Greece and learnt lessons at her feet." (Butcher, S. H., Some Aspects 
of the Greek Genius, p. 43.) 



LATER GREEK EDUCATION 



47 




by the Greek mind, henceforth became the heritage of many 
nations." ^ 

Greek universities were established at Pergamum and Tarsus in 
Asia Minor; at Rhodes on the island of that name in the JEgean; 
and at the newly founded city of Alexandria in Egypt. Antioch, 
in Syria, became another im- 
portant center of Greek influ- 
ence and learning. A large 
library was developed at 
Pergamum, and it was here 
that writing on prepared 
skins of animals^ was be- 
gun, from which the term 
"parchment "(originally " per- 
gament") comes. It was also 
at Pergamum that Galen (born 
c. 130 A.D.) organized what 
was then known of medical 
science, and his work remained 
the standard treatise for more 
than a thousand years. Rhodes 
became a famous center for 

instruction in oratory. During Roman days many eminent men, 
among whom were Cassius, Ctesar, and Cicero, studied oratory here. 

Mingling of Orient and Occident at Alexandria. The most 
famous of all these Greek institutions, however, was the Univer- 
sity of Alexandria, which gradually sapped Athens as a center of 
learning and became the mtellectual capital of the world. The 
greatest library of manuscripts the world had ever known was 
collected together here.^ It is said to have numbered over 
700,000 volumes. These included Greek, Jewish, Egyptian, and 
Oriental works. In connection with the library was the museum, 
where men of letters and investigators were supported at royal 
expense. These two constituted an institution so like a university 
that it has been given that name. Alexandria became not only a 

^ Webster, D. H., Ancient History, p. 302. 

^ Previous to this, paper had been made from the papyrus plant, but Egypt, 
having forbidden its export, necessity again became the mother of invention. 

' With this exception, never before the ItaHan Renaissance was there such interest 
in collecting books. Almost every book written in antiquity was gathered here, 
and the library at Alexandria became the British Museum or the Bibliotheque 
Nationale of the ancient world. Every book entering Egypt was required to be 
brought to this library. 



Fig. 14 
The Gre-ek University World 



48 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



great center of learning, but, still more important, the chief min- 
gling place for Greek, Jew, Egyptian, Roman, and Oriental, and 
here Greek philosophy, Hebrew and Christian religion, and Ori- 
ental faith and philosophy met and mixed. It was this mingled 
civilization and culture, all tinged through and through with the 
Greek, with which the Romans came in contact as they pushed 
their conquering armies into the eastern Mediterranean (R. lo). 
Character of Alexandrian Learning. The great advances in 
knowledge made at Alexandria were in mathematics, geography, 
and science. The method of scientific investigation worked out 
by Aristotle at Athens was introduced and used. Instead of spec- 
ulating as to phenomena and causes, as had been the earlier Greek 
practice, observation and experiment now became the rule. 



UNKNOWN LAND 




Fig. 15. The Known World about 150 a.d. 

A map by Ptolemy, geographer and astronomer at Alexandria. Compare this with 
the map on page 4, and note the progress in geographical discovery which had 
been made during the intervening centuries. 

Euclid (c. 323-283 B.C.) opened a school at Alexandria as early as 
300 B.C., and there worked out the geometry which is still used 
in our schools. Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), who studied under 
Euclid, made many important discoveries and advances in me- 
chanics and physics. Eratosthenes (226-196 B.C.), librarian at 
Alexandria, is famous as a geographer ^ and astronomer, and made 

^ He founded the science of geography. Before his time Greek students had 
concluded that the world was round, instead of flat, as stated in the Homeric poems. 
By careful measurements he determined its size, within a few thousand miles of its 
actual circumference, and predicted that one might sail from Spain to the Indies 
along the same parallel of latitude. 



LATER GREEK EDUCATION 49 

some studies in geology as well. Ptolemy (b. ?; d. 168 a.d.) here 
completed his Mechanism of the Heavens {Syntaxis) in 138 a.d., 
and this became the standard astronomy in Europe for nearly fif- 
teen hundred years, while his geography was used in the schools 
until well into the fifteenth century. The map of the known 
world, shown in Figure 15, was made by him. Hipparcus, the 
Newton of the Greeks, studied the heavens both at Alexandria 
and Rhodes, and counted the stars and arranged them in constel- 
lations. Many advances also were made in the study of medicine, 
the Alexandrian schools having charts, models, and dissecting 
rooms for the study of the human body. The functions of the 
brain, nerves, and heart were worked out there. 

Except in science and mathematics, though, the creative ability 
of the earlier Greeks was now largely absent. Research, organi- 
zation, and comment upon what had previously been done rathei 
was the rule. Still much important work was done here. Books 
were collected, copied, and preserved, and texts were edited and 
purified from errors. Here grammar, criticism, prosody, and 
mythology were first developed into sciences. The study of 
archaeology was begun, and the first dictionaries were maae. 
The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek was begun 
for the benefit of the Alexandrian Jews who had forgotten their 
'jiother tongue, this being the origin of the famous Septuagint ^ 
version of the Old Testament. It is owing to these Alexandrian 
scholars, also, that we now possess the theory of Greek accents, 
and have good texts of Homer and other Greek writers. 

Alexandria sapped in turn. In 30 B.C. Alexandria, too, came 
under Roman rule and was, in turn, gradually sapped by Rome. 
Greek influence continued, but the interest became largely philo- 
sophical. Ultimately Alexandria became the seat of a metaphys- 
ical school of Christian theology, and the scene of bitter religious 
controversies. In 330 a.d., Constantinople was founded on the 
site of the earlier Byzantium, and soon thereafter Greek scholars 
transferred their interest to it and made it a new center of Greek 
learning. There Greek science, literature, and philosophy were 
preserved for ten centuries, and later handed back to a Europe 
just awakening from the long intellectual night of the Middle 
Ages. In 640 A.D. Alexandria was taken by the Mohammedans, 
and the university ceased to exist. The great library was de- 
stroyed, furnishing, it is said, "fuel sufficient for four thousand 

^ From the tradition that seventy scholars labored on it. 



50 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

public baths for a period of six months," and Greek learning was 
extinguished in the western world. 

Our debt to Hellas. As a political power the Greek States left 
the world nothing of importance. As a people they were too in- 
dividualistic, and seemed to have a strange inabihty to unite for 
political purposes. To the new power slowly forming to the west- 
ward — Rome — was left the important task, which the Greek 
people were never able to accomplish, of uniting civilization into 
one political whole. The world conquest that Greece made was 
intellectual. As a result, her contribution to civilization was 
artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific, but not political. 
The Athenian Greeks were a highly artistic and imaginative 
rather than a practical people. They spent their energy on other 
matters than government and conquest. As a result the world 
will be forever indebted to them for an art and a literature of 
incomparable beauty and richness which still charms mankind ; a 
philosophy which deeply influenced the early Christian religion, 
and has ever since tinged the thinking of the western world; and 
for many important beginnings in scientific knowledge which were 
lost for ages to a world that had no interest in or use for science. 
So deeply has our whole western civilization been tinctured by 
Greek thought that one enthusiastic writer has exclaimed, — 
"Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world 
which is not Greek in its origin." ^ (R. ii.) 

In education proper the old Athenian education offers us many 
lessons of importance that we of to-day may well heed. In the 
emphasis they placed on moral worth, education of the body as 
well as the mind, and moderation in all things, they were much 
ahead of us. Their schools became a type for the cities of the 
entire Mediterranean world, being found from the Black Sea south 
to the Persian Gulf and westward to Spain. When Rome became 
a world empire the Greek school system was adopted, and in modi- 
fied form became dominant in Rome and throughout the prov- 
inces, while the universities of the Greek cities for long furnished 
the highest form of education for ambitious Roman youths. In 
this way Greek influence was spread throughout the Mediter- 
ranean world. The higher learning of the Greeks, preserved first at 
Athens and Alexandria, and later at Constantinople, was finally 
handed back to the western world at the time of the Italian Revival 
of Learning, after Europe had in part recovered from the effects 
of the barbarian deluge which followed the downfall of Rome. 
^ Henry Sumner Maine. 



LATER GREEK EDUCATION 51 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Try to picture what might have been the result for western civiHzation 
had the small and newly -developed democratic civilization of Greece 
been crushed by the Persians at the time they overran the Greek 
peninsula. 

2. Do periods of great political, commercial, and intellectual expansion 
usually subject old systems of morality and education to severe strain? 
Illustrate. 

3. Why was the change in the type of Athenian education during the 
Ephebic years a natural and even a necessary one for the new Athens? 

4. Do you understand that the system of training before the Ephebjc years 
was also seriously changed, or was the change largely a re-shaping and 
extension of the education of youths after sixteen? 

5. Were the Sophists a good addition to the Athenian instructing force, or 
not? Why? 

6. How may a State establish a corrective for such a flood of individualism 
as overwhelmed Greece, and still allow individual educational initiative 
and progress? 

7. Do we as a nation face danger from the flood of individualism we have 
encouraged in the past? How is our problem Hke and unlike that of 
Athens after the Peloponnesian War? 

8. What is the place in Greek life and thought of the ideal treatises on edu- 
cation written by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, after the flood of 
individualism had set in? 

9. In what ways was the conquest of Alexander good for world civilization? 
ID. Of what importance is it, in the history of our western civilization, that 

Greek thought had so thoroughly permeated the eastern Mediterranean 
world before Roman armies conquered the region? 

11. Picture for yourself the great intellectual advances of the Greeks by 
contrasting the tribal preparedness-type of education of the early Greek 
States and the learning possessed by the scholars of the University at 
Alexandria. 

12. Compare the spread of Greek language and knowledge throughout the 
eastern Mediterranean world, following the conquests of Alexander, 
with the spread of the English language and ideas as to government 
throughout the modern world. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

7. Wilkins: Athens in the Time of Pericles. 

8. Isocrates: The Instruction of the Sophists. 

9. Xenophon: An Example of Socratic Teaching. 

10. Draper: The Schools of Alexandria. 

11. Butcher: What we Owe to Greece. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Characterize the many educational influences of Athens, as pictured by 
Wilkins (7). 

2. Were the evils of the Sophist teachers, which Isocrates points out (8), 
natural ones? Compare with teachers of vocal training to-day. 



52 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

3. What would be necessary for the proper training of one for eloquence? 
Could any Sophist teacher have trained any one? 

4. Would it be possible to-day for any one city to become such a center of 
the world's intellectual life as did Alexandria (10)? Why? 

5. Could the Socratic method (9) be applied to instruction in psychology, 
ethics, history, and science equally well? Why? To what class of sub- 
jects is the Socratic quiz applicable? 

6. How do you account for the fact that the wonderful promise of Alexan- 
drian science was not fulfilled? 

7. State our debt to the Greeks (11). 

SUPPLEMENTAL REFERENCES 

The most important references are indicated by an * 

* Bevan, J. O. University Life in Olden Time. 

* Butcher, S. H. Some Aspects of the Greek Genius. 

* Davidson, Thos. Aristotle, and Ancient Educational Ideals. 

* Freeman, K. J. Schools of Hellas. 

Gulick, C. B. The Life of the Ancient Greeks. 

* Kingsley, Chas. Alexandria and her Schools. 

Laurie, S. S. Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education. 

* Mahaffy, J. P. Old Greek Education. 

Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. I. 

Walden, John W. H. The Universities of Ancient Greece. 

Wilkins, A. S. National Education in Greece in the Fourth Century, B.C. 



CHAPTER III 

THE EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 

I. THE ROMANS AND THEIR MISSION 

Development of the Roman State. About the time that the 
Hellenes, in the City-States of the Greek peninsula, had brought 
their civilization to its Golden Age, another branch of the great 
Aryan race, which had previously settled in the Itahan peninsula, 
had begun the creation of a new civilization there which was 
destined to become extended and powerful. At the beginning of 




Growth of Rome 
up to .201 B.C. 

At 609 B.C. 

At end of Latin War. 338 B.C. 

By 264 B.C. 

By 201 B.C. 



Fig. i6. The Early Peoples of Italy, and the Extension of the 
Roman Power 

In 509 B.C. Attica opened her citizenship to all free inhabitants, and half a century 
later the Golden Age of Greece was in full swing. By 338 B.C. Greece's glory had 
departed. Philip of Macedon had become master, and its political freedom was 
over. By 264 B.C. the center of Greek life and thought had been tra.nsferred to 
Alexandria, and Rome's great expansion had begun. 



54 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



recorded history we find a number of tribes of this branch of the 
Aryan race settled in different parts of Italy, as is shown in Figure 
1 6. Slowly, but gradually, the smallest of these divisions, the 
Latins, extended its rule over the other tribes, and finally over 
the Greek settlements to the south and the Gauls to the north, so 
that by 201 b.c. the entire Italian peninsula had become subject 
to the City-State government at Rome. 

By a wise policy of tolerance, patience, conciliation, and assim- 
ilation the Latins gradually became the masters of all Italy. Un- 
like the Greek City-States, Rome seemed to possess a natural 
genius for the art of government. Upon the people she con- 
quered she bestowed the great gift of Roman citizenship, and she 
attached them to her by granting local government to their towns 

and by interfering as little as 
possible with their local manners, 
speech, habits, and institutions. 
By founding colonies among them 
and by building excellent military 
roads to them, she insured her 
rule, and by kindly and generous 
treatment she bound the different 
Italian peoples ever closer and 
closer to the central government at 
Rome. By a most wonderful un- 
derstanding of the psychology of 
other peoples, new in the world 
before the work of Rome, and not 
seen again until the work of the English in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, Rome gradually assimilated the peoples of the Italian 
peninsula and in time amalgamated them into a single Roman 
race. In speech, customs, manners, and finally in blood she 
Romanized the different tribes and brought them under her 
leadership. Later this same process was extended to Spain, Gaul, 
and even to far-off Britain. 

A concrete, practical people. The Roman people were a con- 
crete, practical, constructive nation of farmers and herdsmen 
(R. 14), merchants and soldiers, governors and executives. The 
whole of the early struggle of the Latins to extend their rule and 
absorb the other tribes of the peninsula called for practical rulers 
— warriors who were at the same time constructive statesmen 
and executives who possessed power and insight, energy, and 




Fig. 17 
The Principal Roman Roads 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 55 

personality. The long struggle for political and social rights,^ 
carried on by the common people (plebeians) with the ruling class 
(patricians), tended early to shape their government along rough 
but practical lines,^ and to elevate law and orderly procedure 
among the people. The later extension of the Empire to include 
many distant lands — how vast the Roman Empire finally be- 
came may be seen from the map on the following page — called 
still more for a combination of force, leadership, tolerance, pa- 
tience, executive power, and insight into the psychology of subject 
people to hold such a vast empire together. Only a great, creative 
people, working along very practical lines, could have used and 
used so well the opportunity which came to Rome ^ to create a 
great world empire. 

The great mission of Rome. Had Rome tried to impose her 
rule and her ways and her mode of thought on her subject people, 
and to reduce them to complete subjection to her, as the modern 
German and Austrian Empires, for example, tried to do with the 
peoples who came under their control, the Roman Empire could 
never have been created, and what would have saved civilization 

^ This struggle of the common people (plebeians) for an equal place with the ruling 
class (patricians) before the law, in religious matters, and in politics, covered two and 
a half centuries, the old restrictions being broken down but gradually. The most 
important steps in the process were: 

509 B.C. Magistrates forbidden to scourge or execute a Roman citizen without 
giving him a chance to appeal to the people in their popular assembly. This " right 
of appeal" was regarded as the Magna Charta of Roman liberty. 

494 B.C. Plebeian soldiers granted officers of their own (Tribunes) to protect 
them against patrician cruelty and injustice. 

451-449 B.C. Laws must be written — Code commission appointed. Result, 
the Laws of the Twelve Tables (R. 12); these mark the beginning of the great Roman 
legal system. 

445 B.C. Intermarriage between the two orders legalized. 

367 B.C. Right to hold ofl&ce granted, and one of the Consuls elected each year 
to be a plebeian. 

250 B.C. By this date the distinctions between the two orders had disappeared; 
patricians and plebeians intermarried and formed one compact body of citizens in 
the Roman State. 

' "The scholar who compares carefully the Greek constitutions with the Roman 
will undoubtedly consider the former to be finer and more finished specimens of 
political work. The imperfect and incomplete character which the Roman consti- 
tution presents, at almost any point of its history, the number of institutions it 
exhibits which appear to be temporary expedients merely, are necessary results of 
its method of growth to meet demands as they rose from time to time; they are 
evidence, indeed, of its highly practical character." (Adams, G. B., Civilization 
during the Middle Ages, 2d ed., p. 20.) 

' The same opportunity came to Athens after the Persian Wars and to Sparta 
after the Peloponnesian War, but neither possessed the creative power along polit- 
ical and governmental lines, or the tolerance for the ideas and feelings of subject 
peoples, to accomplish anything permanent. Rome succeeded where previous 
States had failed because of her larger insight, tolerance, patience, and constructive 
power. 




Fig. 1 8. The Great Extent of the Roman Empire 

The map shows the Roman Empire as it was by the end of the first century a.d., 
and the tribes shown beyond the frontier are as they were at the beginning of the 
fourth century a.d. It was 2500 miles, air Une, from the eastern end of the Black 
Sea to the western coasts of Spain, 1400 miles from Rome to Palestine, and iioo 
miles from Rome to northern Britain. To maintain order in this vast area Rome 
depended on the loyalty of her subjects, the strength of her armies, her military 
roads, and a messenger service by horse, yet throughout this vast area she imposed 
her law and a unifieci government for centuries. 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 57 

from complete destruction durir>"' the period of the barbarian 
invasions is hard to see. In Rome treated her subjects as 

her friends, and not as conquered peoples; led them, to see that 
their interests were identical with hers; gave them large local inde- 
pendence and freedom in government, under her strong control 
of general affairs ; opened up her citizenship ^ and the line of pro- 
motion in the State to her provincials; ^ and won them to the 
peace and good order which she everywhere imposed by the ad- 
vantages she offered through a common language, common law, 
common coinage, common commercial arrangements, common 
state service, and the common treatment of all citizens of every 
race.^ In consequence, the provincial was willingly absorbed into 
the common Roman race * — absorbed in dress, manners, religion, 
political and legal institutions, family names, and, most impor- 
tant of all, in language. As a result, race pride and the native 
tongues very largely disappeared, and Latin became the spoken 
language of all except the lower classes throughout the whole of 
the Western Empire. Only in the eastern Mediterranean, where 
the Hellenic tongue and the Hellenic civilization still dominated, 
did the Latin language make but little headway, and here Rome 
had the good sense not to try to impose her speech or her culture. 
Instead she absorbed the culture of the East, while the East ac- 
cepted in return the Roman gcvernment and Roman law, and 
Latin in time became the language of the courts and of govern- 
ment. 

Having stated thus briefly the most prominent characteristics 
of the Roman people, and indicated their great work for civiliza- 
tion, let us turn back and trace the development of such educa- 

1 Caesar extended Roman citizenship to certain communities in Gaul and in Sicilj', 
and 'began the further extension of the process of assimilation by taking the con- 
quered provincial into citizenship in the Empire. This was carried on and extended 
by succeeding Emperors until finally, in 212 a.d., Roman citizenship was extended 
to all free-bom inhabitants in all the provinces. 

^ For example, Balbus, a Spaniard, was Consul in Rome forty years before the 
Christian era, and another Spaniard, Nerva, had become Emperor before the close 
of the first century a.d. Many commanders in the armj' and governors in the 
provinces were provincials by birth. 

* Roman citizenship was much more than a mere name. A Roman citizen could 
not be maltreated or punished without a legal trial before a Roman court. If ac- 
cused in a capital case he could always protect himself from what he considered an 
unjust decision by an "appeal to Caesar"; that is, to the Emperor at Rome. The 
protection of law was always extended to his property and himself, wherever in the 
Roman Empire he might live or travel. 

* Both literature and inscriptions testify abundantly to the affectionate regard 
in which Roman rule was held. The rule may have been far from perfect, judged 
from a modern point of view, but it was so much better and so much more orderly 
than anything that had gone before that it was accepted in "U quarters. 



58 HISTORY OF E>)UCATION 

tional system as existed among them, see in what it consisted, 
how it modified the life and ha^:'' . •' thinking of the Roman peo- 
ple, and what educational organization or traditions Rome passed 
on to western civilization. 

II. THE PERIOD OF HOME EDUCATION 

The early Romans and their training. In the early history oi 
the Romans there were no schools, and it was not until about 
300 B.C. that even primary schools began to develop. What edu- 
cation was needed was imparted in the home or in the field and in 
the camp, and was of a very simple type. Certain virtues were 
demanded — modesty, firmness, prudence, piety, courage, seri- 
ousness, and regard for duty — and these were instilled both by 
precept and example. Each home. was a center of the religious 
life, and of civic virtue and authority. In it the father was a high 
priest, with power of life and death over wife and children. He 
alone conversed with the gods and prepared the sacrifices. The 
wife and mother, however, held a high place in the home and in 
the training of the children, the marriage tie being regarded as 
very sacred. She also occupied a respected position in society, 
and was complete mistress of the house (R. 17). 

The religion of the city was an outgrowth of that of the home. 
Virtue, courage, duty, justice — these became the great civic vir- 
tues. Their religion, both family and state, lacked the beauty 
and stately ceremonial of the Greeks, lacked that lofty faith and 
aspiration after virtue that characterized the Hebrew and the 
later Christian faith, was singularly wanting in awe and mystery, 
and was formal and mechanical and practical ^ in character, but 
it exercised a great influence on these early peoples and on their 
conceptions of their duty to the State. 

The father trained the son for the practical duties of a man 

^ Every house was protected from the evil spirits of the outside world by Janus, 
and had its sacred fire presided over by Vesta. Every house had its protecting 
Lares. The cupboard where the food was stored was blest by and under the 
charge of the Penates. The daily worship of these household deities took place at 
the family meal, the father offering a little food and a little wine at the sacred hearth. 
Every house father, too, had his guardian Genius, whose festival was celebrated on 
the master's birthday. In a similar fashion the State had its temples, its sacred fire 
and votive offerings, and various divinities ruled the elements and sent or withheld 
success. 

Almost every activity in life was presided over by some deity, whom it was 
necessary to propitiate before engaging in it. Davidson says, with reference to 
the practical nature of their religion, that "While the Athenians rejoiced before 
their gods, the Romans kept a debtor and creditor account with theirs, and were 
very anxious that the balance should be on the right side." 



/ 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 



59 




Fig. 19. A Roman Father 

INSTRUCTING HIS SON 
(From a Roman Sarcophagus) 



and a citizen; the mother trained the daughter to become a good 
housekeeper, wife, and mother. Morality, character, obedience 
to parents and to the State, and whole-hearted service were em- 
phasized. The boy's father taught him to read, write, and count. 
Stories of those who had done great deeds for the State were told, 
and martial songs were learned and sung. 
After 450 B.C. every boy had to learn 
the Laws of the Twelve Tables (R. 12), 
and be able to explain their meaning 
(R. 13). As the boy grew older he fol- 
lowed his father in the fields and in the 
public place and listened to the con- 
versation of men.^ If the son of a pa- 
trician he naturally learned much more 
from his father, by reason of his larger 
knowledge and larger contact with men 
of affairs and public business, than if he 
were the son of a plebeian. Through 
games as a boy, and later in the exercises of the fields and the 
camps, the boy gained what physical training he received. - 

Education by doing. It was largely an education by doing, as 
was that of the old Greek period, though entirely different in 
character. Either by apprenticeship to the soldier, farmer, or 
statesman, or by participation in the activities of a citizen, was 
the training needed imparted. Its purpose was to produce good 
fathers, citizens, and soldiers.^ Its ideals were found in the real 
and practical needs of a small State, where the abihty to care for 
one's self was a necessary virtue. To be healthy and strong, to 

1 "Among our ancestors," saj's Pliny, "one learned not only through the cars, 
but through the eyes. The young, in observing the elders, learned what they would 
soon have to do themselves, and what they would one day teach to their successor." 

2 Such careful physical training as was given in a Greek palastra and gymnasium 
would have been regarded by the Romans as most effeminate. Unlike the Greeks, 
who strove for a harmonious bodily development, the Romans exercised for useful- 
ness in war. Cicero exclaims, with reference to Greek gymnasial training: "What 
an absurd system of training youth is exhibited in their gymnasia! What a frivo- 
lous preparation for the labors and hazards of war!" 

' Macaulay, in his Horalius, describes the results of the education of this early 
period as follows: 

"Then none were for the party, 
But all were for the State; 
And the rich man loved the poor, 

And the poor man loved the great. 
Then lands were fairly portioned 

And spoils were fairly sold; 
For the Romans were like brothers 
I In the brave days of old." 



6o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

reverence the gods and the institutions of the State, to obey his 

J parents and the laws, to be proud of his family connections and his 

I ancestors, to be brave and efficient in war, to know how to farm 

\ or to manage a business, were the aims and ends of this early train- 

\ing. It produced a nation of citizens who wilhngly subordinated 

themselves to the interests of the State, ^ a nation of warriors who 

brought all Italy under their rule, a calculating, practical people 

who believed themselves destined to become the conquerors and 

rulers of the world, and a reserved and proud race, trained to 

govern and to do business, but not possessed of lofty ideals or 

large enthusiasms in life (Rs. 15, 16). 

III. THE TRANSITION TO SCHOOL EDUCATION 

Beginnings of school education. Up to about 300 B.C. educa 
tion had been entirely in the home, and in the activities of the 
fields and the State. It was a period of personal valor and stern 
civic virtue, in a rather primitive type of society, as yet but httle in 
contact with the outside world, and little need of any other type 
of training had been felt. By the end of the third century B.C., the 
influence of contact with the Greek cities of southern Italy and 
Sicily (Magna GrcEcia), and the influence of the extensive con- 
quests of Alexander the Great in the eastern Mediterranean (334- 
323 B.C.), had begun to be felt in Italy. By that time Greek had 
become the language of commerce and diplomacy throughout the 
Mediterranean, and Greek scholars and tradesmen had begun to 
frequent Rome. By 303 B.C. it seems certain that a few private 
teachers had set up primary schools at Rome to supplement the 
home training, and had begun the introduction of the pedagogue 
as a fashionable adjunct to attract attention to their schools. 
These schools, however, were only a fad at first, and were patron- 
ized only by a few of the wealthy citizens. Up to about 250 B.C., 
pX least, Roman education remained substantially as it had been 
in the preceding centuries. Reading, writing, declamation, 
chanting, and the Laws of the Twelve Tables still constituted the 
subject-matter of instruction, and the old virtues continued to be 
emphasized. 

By the middle of the third century B.C. Rome had expanded its 

1 "The Romans," says the historian, Wilhelm Ihne, "were distinguished from 
all other nations, not only by the extreme earnestness and precision with which they 
conceived their law and worked out the consequences of its fundamental principles, 
but by the good sense which made them submit to the law, once established, as an 
absolute necessity of political health and strength. It was this severity in thinking 
and acting which, more than any other cause, made Rome great and powerful." 



iule tc include — "^ 7- 

and Was ^a-'^^^^^^^^S itself politiailly from a little rural City- 
State intcTq 1 Empire, with large world relationships. A knowl- 
edge of Gi^fek now came to be demanded both for diplomatic and 
for business reasons, and the need of a larger culture, to corre- 
spond will the increased importance of the State, began to be felt 
by the realthier and better-educated classes. Greek scholars, 
broughtin as captured slaves from the Greek colonies of southern 
Italy, foon began to be extensively employed as teachers and as 
sec^etffies. 

Abcit 233 B.C., Li\ius Andronicus, who had been brought to 
R(jm( as a slave when Tarentum, one of the Greek cities of south- 
ern laly, was captured,^ and who later had obtained his freedom, 
macfe a translation of the Odyssey into Latin, and became a teacher 
of Jatin and Greek at Rome. This had a wonderful effect in 
dev^'loping schools and a literary atmosphere at Rome. The 
Od'ssey at once became the great school textbook, in time sup- 
planting the Twelve Tables, and literary and school education 
nov rapidly developed. The Latin language became crystallized 
inform, and other Greek works were soon translated. The be- 
gimings of a native Latin literature were now made. Greek 
h^her schools were opened, many Greek teachers and slaves 
ofered instruction, and the Hellenic scheme of culture, as it had 
p€viously developed in Attica, soon became the fashion at Rome. 

Changes in national ideals. The second century B.C. was even 
rrore a period of rapid change in all phases and aspects of Roman 
lie. During this century Rome became a world empire, annexing 
S>ain, Carthage, Illyria, and Greece, and during the century that 
fdlowed she subjugated northern Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, and 
Caul to the Elbe and the Danube (see Figure 18). Rome soon 
b-came mistress of the whole Mediterranean world. Her ships 
pied the seas, her armies and governors ruled the land. The 
iitroduction of wealth, luxuries, and slaves from the new prov- 
iices, which followed their capture, soon had a very demoralizing 
iifiuence upon the people. Private and public religion and moral- 
ly rapidly declined; religion came to be an empty ceremonial; 

^ The lot of a captive in war, everj'where throughout the ancient world, was to 
\i taken and sold as a slave by his captors. Many educated Greeks were thus taken 
1 the capture of Greek cities in southern Italy and sold as slaves in Rome. These 
vere let out by their masters as teachers of the new learning. Even the thrifty 
Dato, who vigorously opposed the new learning on principle, was not averse to per^ 
"itting his educated Greek slaves tn conduct schools and thus add to his private 



(52 HISTOL ^ OF EDUCATION 

livorce became common; \,ealth and influence ru.^^j ^jjg State; 

laves became very cheap and abundant, and were us^J fgj. almost 

very type of service. From a land of farmers of suall farms, 

-turdy and self-supporting, who lived simply, reared ^rge fam- 

; ies, feared the gods, respected the State, and made in honest 

i ving, it became a land of great estates and wealthy i\en, and 

i.he self-respecting peasantry were transformed into soUiers for 

1 jreign wars, or joined the rabble in the streets of Rome.^ Wealth 

i ecame the great desideratum, and the great avenue to tlis was 

through the public service, either as army commanders an? gov- 

f -nors, or as public men who could sway the multitude andcom- 

^vand votes and influence. Manifestly the old type of eduction 

as not intended to meet such needs, and now in Rome, asore- 

^ 'ously in Athens, a complete transformation in the systen of 

t lining for the young took place. The imaginative and creatve 

:henians, when confronted by a great change in national ide;ls, 

■ olved a new type of education adapted to the new needs of he 
ne; the unimaginative and practical Romans merely adopted 
at which the Athenians had created. 

The Hellenization of Rome. The result was the Hellenizaticn 
the intellectual life of Rome, making complete the Helleniz;- 
n of the Mediterranean world. After the fall of Greece, in 14S 

i'. ■ :., a great influx of educated Greeks took place. As the Latii 

^K>et Horace expressed it: 

Captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror, 
And brought the arts to Latium. 

So completely did the Greek educational system seem to meet th; 
needs of the changed Roman State that at first the Greek school-. 
vvjre adopted bodily — Greek language, pedagogue, higher school: 
■'" -hetoric and philosophy, and all — and the schools were ii 
ity Greek schools but slightly modified to meet the needs o 
:■-'■. ae. Gymnasia were erected, and wealthy Romans, as well aj 
. )i;ths, began to spend their leisure in studying Greek and in 
trying to learn gymnastic exercises. 

' 1 time the national pride and practical sense of the Romans 

'hese men had h'ttle choice otherwise. Grain from Spain and Africa became 

. ;ap that a farmer could not raise enough on his small farm to pay his taxes and 

irt his family, so he was obliged to sell his land to men who turned it into large 

and sheep ranches. He would not emigrate to the provinces, as Englishmen 

done to Canada and Australia, but instead went to the cities, where he led £ 

■ : ' to-mouth existence in a type of tenement house. It was from such scurcei 

he Roman mob, demanding free grain and entertainment in return for its 
was made up. 

/ ■ 



EDUCATION AND VORK OF ROME 



63 




led them to open so-called "culture schools" of their own, mod- 
eled after the Greek, The Latin language then replaced the 
Greek as the vehicle of instruction, though Greek was still studied 
extensively, and Rome began the development of a system of 
private-school instruction possessing some elements that were 
native to Roman life and Roman needs. 

Struggle against, and final victory. That this great change in 
national ideals and in educational practice was accepted without 
protest should not be imagined. Plutarch 
and other writers appealed to the family 
as the center for all true education. Cato 
the elder, who died in 149 B.C., labored 
hard to stem the Hellenic tide. He wrote 
the first Roman book on education, in 
part to show what education a good citi- 
zen needed as an orator, husbandman, 
jurist, and warrior, and in part as a pro- 
test against Hellenic innovations. In 167 
B.C., the first library was founded in 
Rome, with books brought from Greece 
by the conqueror Paulus Emilius. In 
161 B.C., the Roman Senate directed the 
Praetor to see "that no philosophers or 
rhetoricians be suffered in Rome" (R. 20 a), but the edict could 
not be enforced. In 92 B.C., the Censors issued an edict ex- 
pressing their disapproval of such schools (R. 20 b). By 100 
B.C., the Hellenic victory was complete, and the Graeco-Roman 
school system had taken form. In 27 B.C., Rome ceased to be 
a Republic and became an Empire, and under the Emperors the 
professors of the new learning were encouraged and protected, 
higher schools were established in the provinces, literature and 
philosophy were opened as possible careers, and the Greek lan- 
guage, literature, and learning were spread, under Roman imperial 
protection, to every corner of the then civilized world. This vic- 
tory of Hellenic thought and learning at Rome, viewed in the 
light of the future history of the civilization of the world, was an 
event of large importance. 

IV. THE SCHOOL SYSTEM AS FINALLY ESTABLISHED 

The ludus, or primary school. The elementary school, known 
as the Indus, or ludus litcrarmn, the teacher of which was known 



Fig. 20. Cato the Elder 

(234-149 B.C.) 



*.._ 



64 



HISTORY' (v EDUCATION 




as a ludi magister, was the beginning or primary school of the 
scheme as finally evolved. This corresponded to the school of 
the Athenian grammatist, and like it the instruction consisted of 
reading, writing, and counting. These schools were open to both 
sexes, but were chiefly frequented by boys. They were entered 
at the age of seven, sometimes six, and covered the period up 

tojtwelve. Reading and 
writing were taught by 
much the same methods 
as in the Greek schools, 
and approximately the 
same writing materials 
were used. Something of 
the same difficulty was 
experienced also in mas- 
tering the reading art (R. 
2i). Dionysius of Ha- 
licarnassus, a Greek his- 
torian who lived in Rome for twenty-two years, during the first 
century B.C., has left us a clear description of the Roman method 
of teaching reading: 

When we learned to read was it not necessary at first to know the 
name of the letters, their shape, their value in syllables, their differ- 
ences, then the words and their case, their quantity long or short, their 
accent, and the rest? 

Arrived at this point we began to read and write, slowly at first and 
syllable by syllable. Some time afterwards, the forms being sufficiently 
engraved on our memory, we read more cursorily, in the elementary 
book, then in all sorts of books, finally with incredible quickness and 
without making- any mistake. 



Fig. 21. Roman Writing-Materials 

Inkstand, pen, letter, box of manuscripts, wax 
tablets, stylus. 



Writing seems rather to have followed reading, and, as in the 
Greek schools, the pupils copied down from dictation and made 
their own books (dictata) . Literature received no such emphasis 
in the elementary schools of Rome as in those of the Greeks, and 
the palcestra of the Greeks was not reproduced at Rome. 

Due in part to the practical character of the Roman people, 
to the established habit of keeping careful household accounts, 
to the difficulties of their system of calculation,^ to the pracdce 

* Arithmetic was not easy for the Romans, partly because they had no figure or 
other sign for zero, partly because they used a decimal system for counting and a 
duodecimal for their money, and partly because the Roman system of notation 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 



65 



of finger reckoning, and to the vast commercial and financial 
interests that the Romans formed throughout the world which 
they conquered, arithmetic became a subject of fundamental 
importance in their schools, and much time was given to securing 
perfection in calculation and finger reckoning.^ Hence it occu- 
pied a place of large importance in the 
primary school. An abacus or counting- 
board was used, similar to the one shown 
in Figure 22, and Horace mentions a bag 
of stones {calculi) as a part of a school- 
boy's equipment. 

The ludi magister. The ludi magister at 
Rome held a position even less enviable 
than that held by the gramrnatist at 
Athens. "The starveling Greek," who 
was glad to barter his knowledge for the 
certainty of a good dinner, was sneered at 
by many Roman writers. Many slaves 
were engaged in this type of instruction, 
bringing in fees for their owners. It was 
not regarded as of importance that the 
teachers of these schools be of high grade. 
The establishment of and attendance at 
these primary schools was wholly volun- 
tary, and the children in them probably 
represented but a small percentage of those of school age in the 
total population. These schools became quite common in the 
Italian cities, and in time were found in the provincial cities of the 
Empire as well. They remained, however, entirely private-adven- 

(I, V, X, L, C, D, M) did not adapt itself to quick calculation. Try, for example, 
these simple sums: 

Add: CCLVII Subtract: LXVIII 

CIX XXXIV 



• 


• 


• 


• 


• 


• 


• 


M 


C 


X 


I 


c 


X 


1 


• 
• 
• 

• 


• 
• 

• 
• 


• 

• 
• 
• 


• 

• 
• 


e 


• 
• 


• 

• 
• 


• 
• 
• 
• 



Fig. 22. a Roman 
counting-b oard 

Pebbles were used, those 
nearest the numbered di- 
viding partition being 
counted. Each pebble above 
when moved downward 
counted five of those in the 
same division below. The 
board now shows 8,760,254. 



Multiply: 



cxxv 

XII 



Divide: XII |CXXXII 



1 Finger reckoning (whence digits) with the Romans attained a prominence 
probably never reached with any other people. Bills and accounts were reckoned 
up on the fingers, in the presence of the patron. Eighteen positions of the fingers 
of the left hand stood for the nine units and the nine tens, and eighteen positions 
of the fingers of the right hand stood for the nine hundreds and the nine thousands. 
For larger sums, such as ten thousand aad more, various parts of the body were 
touched. Any one who betrayed, according to Quintilian, "by an uncertain or 
awkward movement of his fingers, a want of confidence in his calculations," was 
thought to be but imperfectly trained in arithmetic. 



66 



HISTORY OF x^D'JCATION 



ture undertakings, the State doing nothing toward encouraging 
their establishment, supervising the instruction in them, or 
requiring attendance at them. They were in no sense free schools, 
nor were the prices for instruction fixed, as in our private schools 
of to-day. Instead, the pupil made a present to the master, usu- 
ally at some understood rate, though some masters left the size 
of the fee to the liberality of their pupils.^ The pedagogue, 
copied from Greece, was nearly always an old or infirm slave of 
the family. 

The schools were held anywhere — in a portico (see Figure 23), 
in a shed or booth in front of a house, in a store, or in a recessed 




Fig. 23. A Roman Primary School (Ludus) 

(From a fresco found at Herculaneum) 

This shows a school held in a portico of a house. 

corner shut in by curtains. A chair for the master, benches for 
the pupils, an outer room for cloaks and for the pedagogues to 
wait in, and a bundle of rods (ferula) constituted the necessary 
equipment. The pupils brought with them boxes containing 

^ There was much complaint that parents were slow with their fees, and at times 
forgot them entirely if the boy did not turn out well. Finally, in the reign of 
Diocletian (284-305 a.d.), in an effort to relieve the distress of schoolmasters, prices 
were legally fixed at approximately the equivalent of $1.20 per month per pupil for 
teaching reading and $1.80 for arithmetic, measured in money values of a decade 
ago. These were regarded as "hard times prices." 



EDUCATION ^ANI> WORK OF ROME 67 

writing-materials, book-rolls, and reckoning-stones. Schools 
began early in the morning, pupils in winter going with lanterns 
to their tasks. There was much flogging of children, and in 
Martial we find an angry epigram which he addressed to a school- 
master who disturbed his sleep (R. 23 a). 

The secondary schools. Secondary or Latin grammar schools, 
under a grommaticus, and covering instruction from the age of 
twelve to sixteen, had become clearly differentiated from the 
primary schools under a hidi magister by the time of the death of 
Cato, 149 B.C. At first this higher instruction began in the form 
of private tutors, probably in the homes of the wealthy, and 
Greek was the language taught. By the beginning of the first 
century B.C., however, Latin secondary schools began to arise, 
and in time these too spread to all the important cities of the 
Empire. Attendance at them was wholly voluntary, and was 
confined entirely to the children of the well-to-do classes. The 
teachers were Greeks, or Latins who had been trained by the 
Greeks. Each teacher taught as he wished, but the schools 
throughout the Empire^ame to be much the same in character. 
The course of study consisted chiefly of instruction in grammar 
and literature, the purpose being to secure such a mastery of the 
Latin language and Greek and Latin literatures as might be most 
helpful in giving that broader culture now recognized as the mark 
of an educated man, and in preparing the young Roman to take 
up the life of an orator and public ofi&cial (R. 24). Both Greek 
and Latin secondary schools were in existence, and Quintilian, 
the foremost Roman writer on educational practice, recommends 
attendance at the Greek school first. 

Grammar was studied first, and was intended to develop cor- 
rectness in the use of speech. With its careful study of words, 
phonetic changes, drill on inflections, and practice in composing 
and paragraphing, this made a strong appeal to the practical 
Roman and became a favorite study. Literature followed, and 
was intended to develop an appreciation for literary style, elevate 
thought, expand one's knowledge, and, by memorization and 
repetition, to train the powers of expression. The method prac- 
ticed was much as follows : The selection was carefully read first 
by the teacher, and then by the pupils.^ After the reading the 

' "Reading aloud, with careful attention to pronunciation, accent, quantity, 
and expression, formed an important part of the training in literature of a Latin 
youth. Correct reading of Latin was a much more difficult art, as practiced, than 



68 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

selection was gone over again and the historical, geographical, 
and mythological allusions were carefully explained by the 
teacher.^ The text was next critically examined, to point out 
where and how it might be improved and its expressions strength- 
ened, and much paraphrasing of it was engaged in. Finally the 
study of the selection was rounded out by a judgment ■ — that is, 
a critical estimate of the work, a characterization of the author's 
style, and a resume of his chief merits and defects. The founda- 
tions were here laid for Grammar and Rhetoric as the great 
studies of the Middle Ages. 

Homer and Menander were the favorite authors in Greek, 
and Vergil, Horace, Sallust, and Livy in Latin, with much use of 
y^sop's Fables for work in composition. The pupils made their 
own books from dictation, though in later years educated slave 
labor became so cheap that the copying and sale of books was 
organized into a business at Rome, and it was possible for the 
children of wealthy parents to own their own books. Grammar, 
composition, elocution, ethics, history, mythology, and geography 
were all comprehended in the instruction in grammar and litera- 
ture in the secondary schools. A little music was added at times, 
to help the pupil intone his reading and declamation. A little 
geometry and astronomy were also included, for their practical 
applications. The athletic exercises of the Greeks were rejected, 
as contributing to immorality and being a waste of time and 
strength. In a sense these schools were finishing schools for 
Roman youths who went to any school at all, much as are our 
high schools of to-day for the great bulk of American children. 
The schools were better housed than those of the ludi, and the 
masters were of a better quality and received larger fees. Like 
the elementary schools, the State exercised no supervision or cor 
trol over these schools or the teachers or pupils in them. 

is the reading of English, as all of us well know who learned properly to intone our 
"Arma virumque cano, Trojce qui primus ah oris 
IlaUam,fato profugus, Lavinaquc venit." 

The lack of use of small letters and spacing between the words (R. 21), as well as 
poor punctuation, also added to the difficulty. 

1 A nonsensical minuteness was followed here, and many trivialities were empha- 
sized. Juvenal tells us, in his Seventh Satire, written about 130 a.d., that "a teacher 
was expected to read all histories and know all authors as well as his finger ends. 
That, if questioned, he should be able to tell the name of Anchises' nurse, and the 
name and native land of the stepmother of Anchemotus — tell how many years 
Acestes lived — how many flagons of wine the Sicilian king gave to the Phrygians." 
This reminds us of some of the dissected study of English and Latin until recently 
given in our colleges and high schools. 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 69 

The schools of rhetoric. Up to this point the schools estab- 
Hshed had been for practical and useful information (the primary 
schools) or cultural (the grammar or secondary schools). On top 
of these a higher and professional type of school was next devel- 
oped, to train youths in rhetoric and oratory, preparatory to the 
great professions of law and pubhc hfe at Rome.^ These schools 
were direct descendants of the Greek rhetorical schools, which 
evolved from the schools of the Sophists. Suetonius ^ tells us 
that: 

Rhetoric, also, as well as grammar, was not introduced amongst us 
till a late period, and with still more difficulty, inasmuch as we find 
that, at times, the practice of it was even prohibited.^ . . . However, 
by slow degrees, rhetoric manifested itself to be a useful and honorable 
study, and many persons devoted themselves to it both as a means of 
defense and of acquiring a reputation. In consequence, public favor 
was so much attracted to the study of rhetoric that a vast number of 
professional and learned men devoted themselves to it; and it flour- 
ished to such a degree that some of them raised themselves by it to the 
rank of senators and to the highest offices. 

These schools, thejteachers of which were known as rhetors, fur- 
nished a type of education representing a sort of collegiate educa- 
tion for the period. They were oratorical in purpose, because the 
orator had become the Roman ideal of a well-educated man 
(R. 24). During the life of the Republic the orator found many 
opportunities for the constructive use of his abiUty, and all 
young men ambitious to enter law or politics found the training, 
of these schools a necessary prerequisite. They were attended 
for two or three years by boys over sixteen, but only the wealthier 
and more aristocratic families could afford to send their boys to 
them. 

In addition to oratorical and some legal training, these schools 
included a further linguistic and literary training, some maithe- 

^ Quintilian well states the aim of this higher education when he says that "the 
man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is qualified for the manage- 
ment of public and private affairs, and who can govern communities by his counsels, 
settle them by means of laws, and improve them by judicial enactments, can cer- 
tainly be nothing else but an orator." 

2 In his Lives of Eminent Grammarians and Rhetoricians, chap. r. Suetonius lived 
from 75 to 160 'a. D., and was an advocate at Rome and private secretary to the 
Emperor Hadrian. 

' There was a general dread of Greek higher learning on the part of the older 
Romans, and this found expression in many ways. Among these was an edict of 
the Senate, in i6i B.C., directing the Praetor to see that "no philosophers or rhetori- 
cians be suffered at Rome" (R. 20), a decree which could not be enforced, and the 
edict of the Censors, in 92 B.C. (R. 20), expressing their disapproval of the Latin 
schools of rhetoric. 



70 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

matical and scientific knowledge, and even some philosophy. The 
famous "Seven Liberal Arts" of the Middle Ages — Grammar, 
Rhetoric, and Dialectic; Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and 
Astronom/^ — all seem to have been included in the instruction of 
these schools.^ The great studies, though, were the first three 




Fig. 24. A Roman School of Rhetoric 

This picture, which has been drawn from a description, shows a much better 
type of school than that of the Itidi. 

and some Law, Music being studied largely to help with gestures 
and to train the voice, Geometry to aid in settling lawsuits re- 
lating to land. Dialectic (logic) to aid in detecting fallacies, and 
Astronomy to understand the movements of the heavenly bodies 
and the references of literary writers.^ There was much work in 
debate and in the declamation of ethical and political material 
the fine distinctions in Roman Law and Ethics were brought out, 
and there was much drill in preparing and delivering speeches and 
much attention given to the factors involved in the preparation 
and delivery of a successful oration (R. 25). 

^ These seven studies became the famous studies of the church schools of the 
Middle Ages, with Grammar as the greatest and most important study (see chap. 
VII ; R. 74). The curriculum of the Middle Ages was a direct inheritance from 
Rome. 

2 See Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, book i, chap, x, 22, 37, and 46. This chap- 
ter is devoted largely to a description of the use of these studies. 

' Sample questions which were debated to bring out the fine distinctions in Roman 
Law and Ethics were: 

(a) Was a slave about whose neck a master had hung the leather or golden token 
(worn by free youths only), in order to smuggle him past the boundary, freed when 
he reached Roman soil wearing this insignia of freedom? 

(b) If a stranger buys a prospective draught of fishes and the fisherman draws 
up a casket of jewels, does the stranger own the jewels? 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME yt 

These schools became very popular as institutions of higher 
learning, and continued so even after the later Emperors, by 
seizing the power of the State, had taken away the inspiration 
that comes from a love of freedom and had thus deprived the 
rhetorical art of practical value. The work of the schools then 
became highly stilted and artificial in character, and oratory then 
came to be cultivated largely as a fine art.^ Men educated in 
these schools came to boast that they could speak with equal 
effectiveness on either side of any question, and the art came to 
depend on the use of many and big words and on the manners of 
the stage. Such ideals naturally destroyed the value of these 
schools, and stopped intellectual progress so far as they con- 
tributed to it. 

Much was done by the later Emperors to encourage these 
schools, and they too came to exist in almost every provincial 
city in the Empire. Often they were supported by the cities in 
which they were located. The Emperor Vespasian, about 75 A.D. 
began the practice of paying, from the Imperial Treasury, the sala- 
ries of grammarians and rhetoricians - at Rome. Antoninus Pius, 
who ruled as Emperor from 138 to 161 a.d., extended payment to 
the provinces, gave to these teachers the privileges of the sena- 
torial class, and a certain number in each city were exempted from 
payment of taxes, support of soldiers, and obligations to military 
service. Other Emperors extended these special privileges (R. 26) 
which became the basis for the special rights afterwards granted 
to the Christian clergy (R. 38) and, still later, to teachers in the 
universities (Rs. 101-04). 

University learning. Roman 3'Ouths desiring still further 
training could now journey to the eastward and attend the Greek 
universities (see Figure 14). A few did so, much as American 
students in the middle of the nineteenth century went to Germany 
for higher study. Athens and Rhodes were most favored. Bru- 
tus, Horace, and Cicero, among others, studied at Athens; Caesar, 

1 In the later centuries of the Empire, people went to hear a man who could orate 
or declaim, as people now do to hear a great political orator, a revivalist preacher, 
or a popular actor or singer. A form of amusement for distinguished travelers pass- 
ing through a city was to have some one orate before them. "This power of using 
words for mere pleasurable effect," says Professor Dill, in his Roman Society in the 
Last Century of the Western Empire, "on the most trivial or the most extravagantly 
absurd themes, was for many ages, in both West and East, esteemed the highest 
proof of talent and cultivation." 

- Each Greek rhetorician in Rome was given one hundred sestertia (about $4000) 
vearly from the Imperial Treasury, Quintilian probably being one of the first to 
receive a state salary. 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Cicero, and Cassius at Rhodes. Later Alexandria was in favor. 
In a library founded in the Temple of Peace by Vespasian (ruled 
69 to 79 A.D.) the University at Rome had its origin, and in time 
this developed into an institution with professors in law, medicine, 
architecture, mathematics and mechanics, and grammar and 
rhetoric in both the Latin and Greek languages. In this many 
youths from provincial cities came to study. The lines of instruc- 
tion represented nothing, however, in the way of scientific investi- 
gation or creative thought; the instruction was formal and dog- 
matic, being largely a further elaboration of what had previously 
been well done by the Greeks. 

Y Nature of the educational system developed. Such was the 
educational system which was finally evolved to meet the new 

cultural needs of the Roman 
Empire. In all its foundation 
elements it was Greek. Hav- 
ing borrowed — conquered one 
might almost say — Greek re- 
ligion, philosophy, literature, 
and learning, the Romans 
naturally borrowed also the 
school system that had been 
evolved to impart this culture. 
Never before or since has any 
people adapted so completely 
to their own needs the system 
of educational training evolved 
by another. To the Greek 
basis some distinctively Ro- 
man elements were added to 
adapt it better to the peculiar 
needs of their own people, 
while on the other hand many 
of the finer Greek character- 
istics were omitted entirely. 
Having once adopted the Greek plan, the constructive Roman 
mind organized it into a system superior to the original, but in so 
doing formalized it more than the Greeks had ever done (R. 19). 
That the system afforded an opportunity to wealthy Romans 
to obtain for their children some understanding and appreciation 
of the culture of the Greek world with which their Empire was 





is 


■« 
> 

'5 


(Greek 
Universities) 

University of 

Rome 
(Professor) 


Law 

Medicine 

Architecture 

Mathematics 

Grammar 

Rhetoric 


31 


J) 



u 


Schools of 
Rhetoric 

(Rhetor) 


Grammar 
Rhetoric 
Dialectic 
Law 


•51 


B 
•0 
B 

u 


Latin 
Grammar 
Schools 

(Grammaticus) 


Grammar and 
Literature 


1- 



a 
c 

V 

a 


Ludi, or 
Primary- 
Schools 

(fjuii magister) 


Readitie 
Writing 
Reckoning 



Fig. 25. The Roman Voluntary 
Educational System, as finally 

EVOLVED 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 73 

now in contact, and answered fairly well the preparatory needs 
along political and governmental lines of those Romans who could 
afford to educate their boys for such careers, can hardly be 
doubted (R. 22). Roman writers on education, especially Cicero 
(R. 24) and Quintilian (R. 25), give us abundant testimony as to 
the value and usefulness of the system evolved in the training of 
orators and men for the public service. In the provinces, too, we 
know that the schools were very useful in inculcating Roman 
traditions and in helping the Romans to assimilate the sons of 
local princes and leaders.^ During the days of the Republic the 
schools were naturally more useful than after the establishment 
of the Empire, and especiahy after the later Emperors had 
stamped out many of the political and civic liberties for the 
enjoyment of which the schools prepared. On the other hand, 
the schools reached but a small, selected class of youths, trained 
for only the political career, and cannot be considered as ever 
having been general or as having educated any more than a small 
percentage of the future citizens of the State. Many of the 
important lines of activity in which the Romans engaged, and 
which to-day are regarded as monuments to their constructive 
skill and practical genius, such as architectural achievements, 
the building of roads and aqueducts, the many skilled trades, and 
the large commercial undertakings, these schools did nothing to 
prepare youths for. The State, unlike Athens, never required 
education of any one, did not make what was offered a prepara- 
tion for citizenship, and made no attempt to regulate either 
teachers or instruction until late in the history of the Empire. 
Education at Rome was from the first purely a private-adventure 
affair, most nearly analogous with us to instruction in music and 
dancing. Those who found the education ofifered of any value 
could take it and pay for it; those who did not could let it alone. 
A few did the former, the great mass of the Romans the latter. 
For the great slave class that developed at Rome there was, of 
course, no education at all. 

Results on Roman life and government. Still, out of this pri- 
vate and tuition system of schools many capable political leaders 
and executives came — men who exercised great influence on the 

^ "He [Claudius] was also attentive to provide a liberal education- for the sons 
of their chieftains; . . . and his attempts were attended with such success that they, 
who lately disdained to make use of the Roman language, were now ambitious of 
becoming eloquent. Hence the Roman habit began to be held in honor, and the 
toga was frequently worn." Tacitus's Account of Britain, Agricola, chap. 21. 



74 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

history of the State, fought out her poHtical battles, organized 
and directed her government at home and in the provinces, and 
helped build up that great scheme of government and law and 
order which was Rome's most significant contribution to future 
civilization.^ It was in this direction, and in practical and con- 
structive work along engineering and architectural lines, that 
Rome excelled. The Roman genius for government and law and 
order and constructive undertakings must be classed, in impor- 
tance for the future of civilization in the world, along with the 
ability of Greece in literature and philosophy and art. ''If," 
says Professor Adams, "as is sometimes said, that in the course of 
history there is no literature which rivals the Greek except the 
English, it is perhaps even more true that the Anglo-Saxon is the 
only race which can be placed beside the Romans in creative 
pKJwer and in politics." The conquest of the known world by this 
practical and constructive people could not have otherwise than 
decisively influenced the whole course of human history, and, 
coming at the time in world affairs that it did, the influence on all 
future civilization of the work of Rome has been profound. The 
great political fact which dominated all the Middle Ages, and 
shaped the religion and government and civilization of the time, 
was the fact that the Roman Empire had been and had done its 
work so well. 

V. ROME'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 

Greece and Rome contrasted. The contrast between the 
Greeks and the Romans is marked in almost every particular. 
The Greeks were an imaginative, subjective, artistic, and idealistic 
people, with little administrative ability and few practical ten- 
dencies. The Romans, on the other hand, were an unimagina- 
tive, concrete, practical, and constructive nation. Greece made 
its great contribution to world civilization in literature and phil- 
osophy and art; Rome in law and order and government. The 
Greeks lived a life of aesthetic enjoyment of the beautiful in nature 
and art, and their basis for estimating the worth of a thing was 
intellectual and artistic; to the Romans the £esthetic and the 

1 England offers us the nearest modern analogy. This was one of the last of the 
great European nations to establish popular education, but for centuries previous 
thereto the great private, tuition, grammar schools of England — • Eton, Harrow, 
Rugby, Winchester, and others — together with the Universities of Oxford and 
Cambridge, prepared a succession of leaders for the State — men who have steered 
England's destinies at home and abroad and made her a great world power. 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 75 

beautiful made little appeal, and their basis for estimating the 
worth of a thing was utilitarian. The Greeks worshiped "the 
beautiful and the good," and tried to enjoy life rationally and 
nobly, while the Romans worshiped force and effectiveness, and 
lived by rule and authority. The Greeks thought in personal 
terms of government and virtue and happiness, while the Romans 
thought in general terms of law and duty, and their happiness 
was rather in present denial for future gain than in any immediate 
enjoyment. 

As a result the Romans developed no great scholarly or literary 
atmosphere, as the Greeks had done at Athens. They built up 
no great speculative philosophies, and framed no great theories 
of government. Even their literature was, in part, an imitation 
of the Greek, though possessing many elements of native strength 
and beauty. They were a people who knew how to accomplish 
results rather than to speculate about means and ends. Useful- 
ness and effectiveness were with them the criteria of the worth of 
any idea or project. They subdued and annexed an empire, they 
gave law and order to a primitive world, they civilized and Roman- 
ized barbarian tribes, they built roads connecting all parts of their 
Empire that were the best the world had ever known, their aque- 
ducts and bridges were wonders of engineering skill, their public 
buildings and monuments still excite admiration and envy, in 
many of the skilled trades they developed tools and processes of 
large future usefulness, and their agriculture was the best the 
world had known up to that time. They were strong where the 
Greeks were weak, and weak where the Greeks were strong. 

By reason of this difference the two peoples supplemented one 
another well in the work of laying the foundations upon which 
our modern civilization has been built. Greece created the 
intellectual and aesthetic ideals and the culture for our life, while 
Rome developed the political institutions under which ideals may 
be realized and culture may be enjoyed. From the Greeks and 
Hebrews our modern life has drawn its great inspirations and its 
ideals for life, while from the Romans we have derived our ideals 
as to government and obedience to law. One may say that the 
Romans as a people specialized in government, law, order, and 
constructive practical undertakings, and bequeathed to posterity 
a wonderful inheritance in governmental forms, legal codes, com- 
mercial processes, and engineering undertakings, while the Greeks 
left to us a philosophy, literature, art, and a world culture which 



76 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the civilized world will never cease to enjoy. The Greeks were an 
imaginative, impulsive, and a joyous people; the Romans sedate, 
severe, and superior to the Greeks in persistence and moral force. 
The Greeks were ever young; the Romans were always grown and 
serious men. 

Rome's great contribution. Rome's great contribution, then, 
was along the lines just indicated. To this, the school system 
which became established in the Roman State contributed only 
indirectly and but little. The unification of the ancient world 
into one Empire, with a common body of traditions, practices, 
coinage, speech, and law, which made the triumph of Christianity 
possible; the formulation of a body of law ^ which barbarian tribes 
accepted, which was studied throughout the Middle Ages, which 
formed the basis of the legal system of the mediaeval Church, ana 
which has largely influenced modern practice; the development 
of a language from which many modern tongues have been de- 
rived, and which has modified all western languages; and the 
perfection of an alphabet which has become the common property 
of all nations whose civilization has been derived from the Greek 
and Roman — these constitute the chief contributions of Rome 
to modern civilization. 

Roman'city government, too, had been established throughout 
all the provincial cities, and this remained after the Empire had 
passed away. The municipal corporation, with its charter of 
rights, has ever since been a fixed idea in the western world. 
Roman law, organized into a compact code, and studied in the 
law schools of the Middle Ages, has modified our modern ideas 
and practices to a degree we scarcely realize. It was accepted 
by the German rulers as a permanent thing after they had over- 
run the Empire, and it remained as the law of the courts wherever 
Roman subjects were tried. Preserved and codified at Constanti- 
nople under Justinian in the sixth century, and re-introduced into 
western Europe when the study of law was revived in the newly 
founded universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 

^ This grew up, as all law grows, by enacted laws and decisions of the courts, and 
in time came to be an enormous body of law. Lacking the printed law books and 
indices of to-day, to obtain a knowledge of Roman law became a formidable task. 
Finally the practical Roman mind codified it, and reduced it to system and order. 
The Theodosian Code, of 438 a.d., and the Justinian Code, of 52S and 534 a.d., were 
the final results. These codes were compact, capable of duplication with relative 
ease, and later became the standard textbooks throughout the Middle Ages. The 
great importance of these codifications may be appreciated when we know that 
almost all the original laws and decisions from which they were compiled have been 
lost. 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 



11 



Roman law has greatly modified all modern legal practices and 
has become the basis of the legal systems of a number of modern 
states.^ 

Of all the Roman contributions to mod- 
ern civilization perhaps the one that most 
completely permeates all our modern life 
is their alphabet and speech. Figure 26 
shows how our modern alphabet goes back 
to the old Roman, which they obtained from 
the Greek colonies in southern Italy, and 
which the Greeks obtained from the still 
earlier Phoenicians. This alphabet has be- 
come the common property of almost all 
the civilized world.- In speech, the French, 
Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian tongues 
go back directly to the Latin, and these are 
the tongues of Mexico and South America 
as well. The English language, which is 
spoken throughout a large part of the civ- 
ilized world, and by one third of its inhab- 
itants, has also received so many additions 
from Romanic sources that we to-day 
scarcely utter a sentence without using 
some word once used by the citizens of 
ancient Rome. 

Among the smaller but nevertheless 
important contributions which we owe to 
Rome, and which were passed on to med- 
iaeval and modern Europe, should be men- 

^ The Romanic countries — France, Spain, Italy — 
have drawn their law most completely from the Jus- 
tinian Code. Due to Spanish and French occupation 
of parts of America, Roman legal ideas also entered 
here, the Louisiana Code of 1824 being Roman in law 
and technical expressions and spirit, though English in 
language. Spanish and Portuguese settlement of the 
South American continent has carried Roman law there. 

* The Roman alphabet is the alphabet of all North 
and South America, Australia, Africa, and all of Europe 
except Russia, Greece, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and 
a few minor Slavic and Teutonic peoples. In Ger- 
many and Austria, Roman letters are rapidly super- 
seding the more difficult German letters in the print- 
ing of papers and books for the better-educated classes. 
In India, Siam,.China, and Japan, Roman letters are 
also being increasingly used. 









1 c- 








a 


c 
c 

1 


«> 

6 

•D 


c 

£ 

a 

T3 


odern Rom 
nglish, etc. 

IERMAJ4 


Q. 








Siu 


4 


A 


A 


A 


51 


i 


& 


B 


B 


25 


> 


c 


<C 


C 


d 


A 


>D 


D 


D 


^ 


^ 


/^ 


E 


E 


Q 


Y 


^ 


F 


F 


Is- 






C 


G 


« 


e^H 


BH 


H 


H 


•^ 


i 


1 


1 


1 
J 


3 
3 


%. 


fc 


K 


K 


^ 


I 


U 


V^ 


L 


2 


W\ 


Al 


M 


M 


m 


M 


A/ 


N 


N 


^ 




















P 


PP 


P 


^ 


9 


9 


9Q 


Q 


a 


q 


PR 


R 


R 


94 


vV 


^Z 


^S 


S 


S 


r 


T 


T 


T 
U 


X 

w 




Y 


V 


V 

w 


5^ 




X 


X 


X 
Y 








z 


z 


3 



Fig. 26. Origin of Our 
Alphabet 

The German type, like the 
so-called Old English (see 
Fig. 4s), illustrates the 
corruption of letter forms 
through the copying of 
manuscripts during the 
Middle Ages. 



78 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tioned certain practical knowledge in agriculture and the me- 
chanic arts; many inventions and acquired skills in the arts and 
trades; an organized sea and land trade and commerce; cleared 
^nd improved lands, good houses, roads and bridges; great ar- 
chitectural and engineering remains, scattered all through the 
provinces; the beginnings of the transformation of the slave into 
the serf, from which the great body of freemen of modern Europe 
later were evolved; and certain educational conceptions and prac- 
tices which later profoundly influenced educational methods and 
procedure. 

How large these contributions were we shall appreciate better 
as we proceed with our history. Of the negative contributions, 
the most dangerous has been the idea of the rule of one imperial 
government, which has inspired the autocratic governments of 
modern Europe to try to imitate the world-wide rule of Imperial 
Rome. 

The way paved for Christianity. It was the great civilizing and 
unifying work of the Roman State that paved the way for the 
next great contribution to the foundations of the structure of our 
modern civilization — the contribution of Christianity. Had 
Italy never been consolidated; had the barbarian tribes to the 
north never been conquered and Romanized; had Spain and 
Africa and the eastern Mediterranean never known the rule of 
Rome; had the Latin language never become the speech of the 
then civilized peoples; had Roman armies never imposed law and 
order throughout an unruly world; had Roman governors and 
courts never established common rights and security ; had Roman 
municipal government never come to be the common type in 
the cities of the provinces; had Roman schools in the provincial 
cities never trained the foreign citizen in Roman ways and to 
think Roman thoughts ; had Rome never established free trade 
and intercourse throughout her Empire; had Rome never devel- 
oped processes and skills in agriculture and the creative arts; 
had there been no Roman roads and common coinage ; and had 
Rome not done dozens of other important things to unify and 
civilize Europe and reduce it to law and order, it is hard to 
imagine the chaos that would have resulted when the Empire 
gave way to the barbarian hordes which finally overwhelmed 
it. Where we should have been to-day in the upward march 
of civilization, without the work of Rome, it is impossible 
to say. 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 79 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Contrast the Romans as a colonizing power with the modern Germans. 
The EngHsh. The French. 

2. At what period in our national development did home education with 
us occupy substantially the same place as it did in Rome before 300 B.C.? 
In what respects was the education given boys and girls similar? Dif- 
ferent? 

3. What was the most marked advance over the Greeks in the early Roman 
training? 

4. Contrast the education of the Athenian, Spartan, and Roman boy, 
during the early period in each State. 

5. To what extent does early Roman education indicate the importance of 
the parent and of study of biography in the education of the young? 

6. Was the change in character of the education of Roman youths, after 
the expansion of the Roman State and the establishment of world con- 
tacts, preventable, or was it a necessary evolution? Why? Have we 
ever experienced similar changes? 

7. As a State increases in importance and enlarges its world contacts, is a 
correspondingly longer training and enlarged culture necessary at home? 

8. What idea do you get as to the extent to which the Latinized Odyssey 
was read from the fact that the Latin language was crj-stallized in form 
shortly after the translation was made? 

9. What does the rapid adoption of the Greek educational system, and the 
later evolution of a native educational system out of it, indicate as to 
the nature of Roman expansion? 

10. Was the introduction of the Greek pedagogue as a fashionable adjunct 
natural? Why? 

11. Why is a period of very rapid expansion in a State Kkely to be demorahz- 
ing? How may the demoralization incident to such expansion be antici- 
pated and minimized? 

12. Why does the coming of large landed estates introduce important social 
problems? Have we the beginnings of a social problem of this type? 
What correctives have we that Rome did not have? 

13. State the economic changes which hastened the introduction of a new 
type of higher training at Rome. 

14. Was the Hellcnization of Rome which ensued a good thing? Why? 

15. How do you account for Rome not developing a state school system in 
the period of great national need and change, instead of leaving the 
matter to private initiative? Do you understand that any large percent- 
age of youths in the Roman State ever attended any school? 

16. Why do older people usually oppose changes in school work manifestly 
needed to meet changing national demands? 

17. Compare the difficulties met with in learning to read Greek and Latin. 
Either and English. 

18. How do you account for the much smaller emphasis on literature and 
music in the elementary instruction at Rome than at Athens? How for 
the much larger emphasis on formal grammar in the secondary schools 
at Rome? 

19. What subjects of study as we now know them were included in the 
Roman study of grammar and rhetoric? 

20. How do you explain the greater emphasis placed by the Romans on 
secondary education than on elementary education? 

21. What particular Roman need did the higher schools of oratory and 
rhetoric supply? 



8o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

22. What does the exclusive devotion of these schools to such studies indi- 
cate as to professional opportunities at Rome? 

23. How do you account for the continuance of these schools in favor, and 
for the aid and encouragement they received from the later Emperors, 
when the very nature of the Empire in large part destroyed the careers 
for which they trained? 

24. Compare Rome and the United States in their attitudes toward foreign- 
born peoples. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

13. The Laws of the Twelve Tables. 

13. Cicero: Importance of the Twelve Tables in Education. 

14. Schreiber: A Roman Farmer's Calendar. 

15. Polybius: The Roman Character. 

16. Mommsen: The Grave and Severe Character of the EarUer Romans. 

17. Epitaph: The Education of Girls. 

18. Marcus Aurelius: The Old Roman Education described. 

19. Tacitus: The Old and the New Education contrasted. 

20. Suetonius: Attempts to Prohibit the Introduction of Greek Higher 
Learning. 

(a) Decree of the Roman Senate, 161 B.C. 
{b) Decree of the Censor, 92 B.C. 

21. Vergil: Difficulty experienced in Learning to Read. 

22. Horace: The Education given by a Father. 

23. Martial: The Ludi Magister. 

(a) To the Master of a Noisy School. 
{b) To a Schoolmaster. 

24. Cicero: Oratory the Aim of Education. 

25. Quintilian: On Oratory. 

26. Constantine: Privileges granted to Physicians and Teachers. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Give reasons why the Laws of the Twelve Tables (12) were considered 
of such fundamental importance (13) in the education of the early Roman 
boy? How do you explain their being supplanted later by the Latinized 
Odyssey? 

2. What does the Farmer's Calendar (14) reveal as to the character of 
Roman life? 

3. Contrast the Roman character (15, 16) with that of the Athenian. 

4. Compare the education of a Roman matron, as revealed by the epitaph 
(17), with that of a girl in later American colonial times. 

5. After reading Marcus Aurelius (18) and Tacitus (19), what is your judg- 
ment as to the relative merits of the old and the new education: (o) as a 
means of training youths? (b) as adapted to the changed conditions of 
Imperial Rome? 

6. How do you account for the attempts of the conservative officials of the 
State to prohibit the introduction of Greek higher schools (20 a-b) 
proving so unsuccessful? 

7. Compare the difficulties involved in learning to read Greek (Fig. 6) and 
Latin (21). Either and English. 

8. What type of higher educational advantages does the selection from 



EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME 8i 

Horace (22) indicate as prevailing in Roman cities? Compare with 

present-day advanced education. 
9. What do Martial's Epigrams to the Roman schoolmasters (23 a-b) indi- 
cate as to the nature of the schools, school discipline, and social status of 

the Roman primary teacher? 
D. Do the selections from Cicero (24) and Quintihan (25) satisfy you that 

oratory was a sufficiently broad idea for the higher education of youths 

under the Empire? Why? 
t. What does the decree of Constantine (26) indicate as to the social status 

of the higher teachers under the Empire? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Abbott, F. F. Society and Politics in Ancient Rome. 

* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. 

Anderson, L. F. "Some Facts regarding Vocational Education among 
the Greeks and Romans"; in School Review, vol. 20, pp. 191-201. 

* Clarke, Geo. Education of Children at Rome. 

* Dill, Sam'l. Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. 

* Laurie, S. S. Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education. 
Mahaffy, J. P. The Silver Age of the Greek World. 

Ross, C. F. "The Strength and Weakness of Roman Education"; in 

School atui Society, vol. 6, pp. 457-63. 
Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. 
Thorndike, Lynn. History of Mediceval Europe. 
Westermann, W. L. Vocational Training in Antiquity; in School Review, 

vol. 22, pp. 601-10. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE RISE AND CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 

I. THE RISE AND VICTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 

Religions in the Roman world. As was stated in the preceding 
chapter (p. 58), the Roman state rehgion was an outgrowth of 
the reh'gion of the home. Just as there had been a number of 
fireside deities, who were supposed to preside over the different 
activities of the home, so there were many state deities who were 
supposed to preside over the different activities of the State. In 
addition, the Romans exhibited toward the rehgions of all other 
peoples that same tolerance and willingness to borrow which they 
exhibited in so many other matters. Certain Greek deities were 
taken over and temples erected to them in Rome, and new deities, 
to guard over such functions as health, fortune, peace, concord, 
sowing, reaping, etc., were established.^ Extreme tolerance also 
was shown toward the special religions of other peoples who had 
been brought within the Empire, and certain oriental divinities 
had even been admitted and given their place in Rome. 

Like many other features of Roman life, their religion was 
essentially of a practical nature, dealing with the affairs of every- 
day life, and having little or no relation to personal morality." 
It promised no rewards or punishments or hopes for a future life, 
but rather, by uniting all citizens in a common reverence and fear 
of certain deities, helped to unify the Empire and hold it together. 
After the death of Augustus (14 a.d.), the Roman Senate deified 
the Emperor and enrolled his name among the gods, and Emperor 
worship was added to their ceremonies. This naturally spread 
rapidly throughout the Empire, tended to unite all classes in 

^ The Farmer's Calendar, given in the accompanying Booh of Readings (R. 14), 
illustrates very well the gods and sacrifices for one phase of Roman life. Pctronius, 
in his Satires, says, "Our country is so full of divinities that it is much easier to find 
a god than a man." 

2 "The chief objects of pagan religion were to foretell the future, to explain the 
universe, to avert calamity, and to obtain the assistance of the gods. They con- 
tained no instruments of moral teaching analogous to our institution of preaching, 
or to the moral preparation for the reception of the sacrament, or to confession, or 
to the reading of the Bible, or to religious education, or to united prayer for spiritual 
benefits. To make men virtuous was no more the function of the priest than of the 
physician," (Lecky, W. E. H., History of European Morals, chap, iv.) 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 83 

allegiance to the central government at Rome, and seemed to form 
the basis for a universal religion for a universal empire. 

Feeling of need for something more. As an educated class 
arose in Rome, this mixture of diverse divinities failed to satisfy; 
the Roman religion, made up as it was of state and parental duties 
and precautions, lost with them its force; and the religious cere- 
monies of the home and the State lost for them their meaning. 
The mechanical repetition of prayers and sacrifices made no 
appeal to the emotions or to the moral nature of individuals, and 
offered no spiritual joy or consolation as to a life beyond. The 
educated Greeks before had had this same feeling, and had in- 
dulged in much speculation as to the moral nature of man. Many 
educated Romans now turned to the Greek philosophers for some 
more philosophical explanation of the great mystery of life and 
death. 

Of all the philosophies developed in the philosophical schools 
of Athens, the one that made the deepest appeal to the practical 
Roman mind was that of the Stoics, founded by Zeno, 308 B.C. 
Virtue, claimed the Stoics, consists in so living that one's life is in 
accordance with that Universal Reason which rules the world. 
Riches, position, fame, success — these count for but little. He 
who trains himself to be above grief, hope, joy, fear, and the ills of 
life — be he slave or peasant or king — may be happy because he 
is virtuous. Reason, rather than the feelings, is the proper rule 
of life. The Stoics also preached the brotherhood of man, and to 
a degree expressed a humble reliance on a providence which con- 
trolled affairs. This philosophy in a way met the need for a 
religion among the better-educated Romans, and made consider- 
able headway during the early days of the Empire.^ While serv- 
ing as a sort of religion for those capable of embracing it, it was 
to o inte llectual to reach^more than a few, and was not adapted to 
become a universal religion for all sorts and conditions of men. 
What was needed was a new moral philosophy or religion that 
would touch all mankind. To do this it must appeal to the emo- 
tions more than to the intellect. Such a religion was at this time 
taking shape and gathering force and strength in a remote corner 
of the Empire. 

^ Seneca (4-65 a.d.), the tutor of the Emperor Nero, and the Greek freedman 
Epictetus (d. 100 a.d.) both expounded Stoicism at Rome during the first Christian 
century, and the Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus AureHus (161-180 a.d.) repre- 
sents one of the finest expositions of the application of this philosophy to the 
problems of human life. 



84 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Where this new religion arose. Far to the eastern end of the 
Mediterranean there had long lived a branch of the Semitic race, 
which had developed a national character and made a contribu- 
tion of first importance to the religious thought of the world. 
These were the Hebrew people who, leaving Egypt about 1500 
B.C., in the Exodus, had come to inhabit the land of Canaan, 
south of Phoenicia and east and north of Egypt. From a wander- 
ing, pastoral people they had gradually changed to a settled, 
agricultural people, and had begun the development of a regular 
State. Unwilling, however, to bear the burdens of a political 
State, and objecting to taxation, a standing army, and forced 
labor for the State, the nationality which promised at one time 
fell to pieces, and the land was overrun by hostile neighbors and 
the people put under the yoke. After a sad and tempestuous 
history, which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem by the 
Romans in 70 a.d., the inhabitants were sold into slavery and 
dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. 

These people developed no great State, and made no contribu- 
tions to government or science or art. Their contribution was 
along religious lines, and so magnificent and uplifting is their 
religious literature that it is certain to last for all time. Alone 
among all eastern people they early evolved the idea of one 
omnipotent God. The religion that they developed declared 
man to be the child of God, erected personal morahty and service 
to God as the rule of life, and asserted a life beyond the grave. 
It was about these ideas that the whole energy of the people 
concentrated, and religion became the central thought of their 
lives. This religion, unlike the other religions of the Mediter- 
ranean world, emphasized duty to God, service, personal moral- 
ity, chastity, honesty, and truth as its essential elements. The 
Law of Moses became the law of the land. Woman was elevated 
to a new place in the life of the ancient world. ^ Children became 
sacred in the eyes of the people. Their literary contribution, the 
Old Testament — written by a series of patriarchs, lawgivers, 
prophets, and priests — pictures, often in sublime language, the 
various migrations, deliverances, calamities, and religious hopes, 
aspirations, and experiences of this Chosen People. 

The unity of this people. Just before their country was over- 
run and they were carried captive to Babylon, in 588 B.C., the 

1 See Proverbs, xxxi, for a good statement of the ancient Hebrew ideal of woman- 
hood. 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 85 

Pentateuch ^ had been reduced to writing and made an authori- 
tative code of laws for the people. This served as a bond oi 
union among them during the exile, and after their return to 
Palestine, in 538 B.C., the study and observance of this law became 
the most important duty of their lives. The synagogue was 
established in every village for its exposition, where twice on 
every Sabbath day the people were to gather to hear the law ex- 
pounded. A race of Scribes, or scripture scholars, also arose to 
teach the law, as well as means for educating additional scribes. 
They were to interpret the law, and to apply it to the daily lives 
of the people. As the law was a combination of religious, cere- 
monial, civil, and sanitary law, these scribes became both teach- 
ers and judges for the people. In time they became the deposi- 
taries of all learning, superseded the priesthood, and became the 
leaders {rabbins, whence rabbi) of the people. " The voice of the 
rabbi is the voice of God," says the Talmud, a collection of 
Hebrew customs and traditions, with comments and interpreta- 
tions, written by the rabbis after 70 B.C. By most Jews this is 
held to be next in sacredness to the Old Testament (R. 27). 

Realizing, after the return from captivity, that the future 
existence of the Hebrew people would depend, not upon their 
military strength, but upon their moral ^unity , and that this must 
be based upon the careful training of eacTicnild in the traditions 
of his fathers, the leaders of the people began the evolution of a 
religious school system to meet the national need. ReaHzing, 
too, that parents could not be depended upon in all cases to pro- 
vide this instruction, the leaders provided it and made it com- 
pulsor y. Great open-air Bible classes were organized at first 
and these were gradually extended to all the villages of the coun- 
try. Elementary schools were developed later and attached to 
the synagogues, and finally, in_64uA-D., the high priest, Joshua ben 
Gamala, ordered the establishment of an elementary school in 
every village^ made attendance compulsory for all male children, 
and provided for a combined type of religious and household 
instruction at home for all girls. Reading, writing, counting, the 
history of the Chosen People, the poetry of the Psalms, the Law 
of the Pentateuch, and a part of the Talmud constituted the 
subject-matter of instruction. The instruction was largely oral, 

1 This collective term is applied to the first five books of the Old Testament, and 
includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These five books 
form a wonderful collection of the historical and Ipgal material relating to the wan- 
derings and experiences and practices of the people. 



86 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and learning by heart was the common teaching plan. The child 
was taught the Law of his fathers, trained to make holiness a rule 
of his life and to subordinate his will to that of the one God, and 
commanded to revere his teachers (R. 27) and uphold the tradi- 
tions of his people. 

After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 a.d.) and the scatter- 
ment of the people, the school instruction was naturally more or 
less disrupted, but in one way or another the Hebrew people have 
ever since managed to keep up the training of rabbis and the 
instruction of the young in the Law and the traditions of their 
people, and as a consequence of this instruction we have to-day 
the interesting result of a homogeneous people who, for over 
eighteen centuries, have had no national existence, and who have 
been scattered and persecuted as have no other people. History 
offers us no better example of the salvation of a people by means 
of the compulsory education of all. 

The new Christian faith. It was into this Hebrew race that 
Jesus was born,^ and there he lived, learned, taught, made his 
disciples, and was crucified. Building on the old Hebrew moral 
law and the importance of the personal life, Jesus made his appeal 
to the i ndivid ual, and sought the moral regeneration of society 
througlTllie moral regeneration of individual men and women. 
This idea of individuality and of personal souls worth saving was 
a new idea in a world where the submergence of the individual 
in the State had everywhere up to that time been the rule. Even 
the Hebrews, in their great desire to perpetuate their race and 
faith, had suppressed and absorbed the individual in their religious 
State. The teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, with their 
emphasis on charity, sympathy, self-sacrifice, and the brother- 
hood of all men, tended to obliterate nationality, while the 
emphasis they gave to the future life, for which fife here was but 
a preparation, tended to subordinate the interests of the State 
and withdraw the concern of men from worldly affairs. In a 
series of simple sermons, Jesus set forth the basis of this new faith 
which he, and after him his disciples, offered to the world. 

At the time of his crucifixion his disciples numbered scarcely 
one hundred persons. For some years after his death his disciples 

^ Chapter i of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew gives, in detail (1-16), the 
genealogy of Jesus, concluding with the following verse: 

"17. So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; 
and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; 
and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations^" 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 87 

remained in Jerusalem, preaching that he was the Messiah or 
Christ, whom the Hebrew people had long expected, and making 
converts to the idea. Later in Samaria, Damascus, and Antioch 
they made additional converts among the Jews. Up to this point 
the Christians had been careful to keep up all the old Jewish 
customs, and it was even doubted at first whether any but Jews 
could properly be admitted to the new faith. A new convert, 
^aul of Tarsus, a Jew who had studied in the Greek university 
there and who afterwards became the Apostle Paul, did much to 
open the new faith to the Gentiles, as the men of other nations 
were known. Speaking Greek, and being versed in Greek phi- 
losophy, and especially Stoicism, he gave thirty years of most 
effective service to the establishment of Christian churches ^ in 
Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece (R. 29), and Italy (R. 28). His 
work was so important that he has often been called the second 
founder of the Christian Church. 

The challenge of Christianity. Into a Roman world that had 
already passed the zenith of its greatness came this new Christian 
faith, cjiallenging almost everything for which the Roman world 
had stood. In place of Roman citizenship and service to the 
State as the purpose of life, the Christians set up the importance 
of the life to come. Instead of pleasure and happiness and the 
satisfaction of the senses as personal ends, the Christians preached 
denial of all these things for the greater joy of a future life. In 
a society built on a huge basis of slavery and filled with social 
classes, the Christians proclaimed the equalitx of all men before 
God. To a nation in which family life had become corrupt, 
infidelity and divorce common, and infanticide a prevailing prac- 
tice, the Christians proclaimed the sacredness of the marriage tie 
and the family life, and the exposure of infants as simple murder. 
In place of the subjection of the individual to the State, the 
Christians demanded the subjection of the individual only to God, 
In place of a union of State and religion, the Christians demanded 
the complete separation of the two and the subordination of the 
State to the Church. Unlike all other religions that Rome had 
absorbed, the Christians refused to be accepted on any other 
than exclusive terms. The worship of all other gods the Chris- 
tians held to be sinful idol-worship, a deadly sin in the eyes of God, 

^ To many of these churches he wrote a series of epistles. These constitute a 
little more than one fourth of the New Testament. See accompanying Book of 
Readings (or Romans, i, 1-17) for the introductory part of Paul's Epistle to the 
Romans. 



88 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and they were willing to give up their lives rather than perform 
the simplest rite of what they termed pagan worship (R. 28) . To 
the deified Emperor the Christians naturally could not bend the 
knee (Rs. 30 b, 31 a-b, 34). 

At first the new faith attracted but little attention from any- 
body of education or influence. Its converts were few during the 
first century, and these largely from among the lowest social 
classes in the Empire. Workmen and slaves, and women rather 
than men, constituted the large majority of the early converts 
to the new faith. The character of its missionaries ^ also was 
against it, and its challenge of almost all that characterized the 
higher social and governmental life of Rome was certain to make 
its progress difficult, and in time to awaken powerful opposition ^ 
to it. Yet, notwithstanding all these obstacles, its progress was 
relatively rapid. 

The victory of Christianity. By the close of the first century 
there were Christian churches throughout most of Judea and 
Asia Minor, and in parts of Greece and Macedonia. During the 
second century other churches were established in Asia Minor, 
in Greece, and along the Black Sea, and at a few places in Italy 
and France ; and before four centuries had elapsed from the cruci- 
fixion Christian churches had been established throughout almost 
all the Roman world. This is well shown by the map on the oppo- 
site page. The message of hope that Christianity had to ofier to 
all; the simplicity of its organization and teachings; the great 
appeal which it made to the emotional side of human life; the hope 
of a future life of reward for the burdens of this which it extended 
to all who were weary and heavy laden ; the positiveness of con- 
viction of its apostles and followers; and the completeness with 
which it satisfied the religious need and longings of the time, first 
among the poor and among women and later among educated 
men — all helped the new faith to win its way. The unity in 
government that Rome had everywhere established; ^ the Roman 

1 "Its missionaries were Jews, a turbulent race, not: to be assimilated, and as 
much despised and hated by pagan Rome as by the mediaeval Ciiristians. Wherever 
it attracted any notice, therefore, it seems to have been regarded as some rebel fac- 
tion of the Jews, gone mad upon some obscure point of the national superstition 
— an outcast sect of an outcast race." (Adams, G. B., Civilization during the 
Middle Ages, p. 39.) 

"^ "Starting from an insignificant province, from a despised race, proclaimed by 
a mere handful of ignorant workmen, demanding self-control and renunciation be- 
fore unheard of, certain to arouse in time powerful enemies in the highly cultivated 
and critical society which it attacked, the odds against it were tremendous." {Ibid., 
p. 41.) 

^ "It is not easy to imagine how, in the face of an Asia Minor, a Greece, an Italy 




Fig. 27. The Growth of Christianity to the End of the Fourth 

Century 



90 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

peace {pax Romano) that Rome had everywhere imposed; the 
spread of the Greek and Latin languages and ideas throughout 
the Mediterranean world; the right of freedom of travel and 
speech enjoyed by a Roman citizen, and of which Saint Paul and 
others on their travels took advantage; ^ the scatterment of Jews 
throughout the Empire, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 
70 A.D. — all these elements also helped. 

That Christianity made its headway unmolested must not be 
supposed. While at first the tendency of educated Romans and 
of the government was to ignore or tolerate it, its challenge was so 
direct and provocative that this attitude could not long continue. 
Under the Emperor Claudius (41-54 a.d.) "all the Jews who were 
continually making disturbances at the instigation of one Chres 
tus" were unsuccessfully ordered banished from Rome. In the 
reign of the Emperor Nero, in 64 a.d., many horrible tortures 
were inflicted on this as yet small sect. It was not, however, till 
later, when the continued refusal of the Christians to offer sacri- 
fices to the Emperor brought them under the law as disloyal 
(R. 30 a) subjects, that they began to be much punished for their 
faith (R. 31 a-b). The times were bad and were going from bad 
to worse, and the feelings of many were that the adverse condi- 
tions in the Empire — war, famine, floods, pestilence, and bar- 
barian inroads — were due to the neglect of the old state religion 
and to the tolerance extended the vast organized defiance of the 
law by the Christians. In the first century they had been largely 
ignored. In the second, in some places, they were punished. In 
the third century, impelled by the calamities of the State and the 
urging of those who would restore the national religion to its 
earlier position, the Emperors were gradually driven to a series 
of heavy persecutions of the sect (R. 30 a). But it had now be- 
come too late. The blood of the martyrs proved to be the seed 
of the Church (R. 35). The last great persecution under the 
Emperor Diocletian, in 303 (R. 33), ended in virtual failure. In 
311 the EmperoF'Galerius placed Christianity on a plane of 

split up into a hundred small republics; of a Gaul, a Spain, an Africa, an Egypt, in 
possession of their old national institutions, the apostles could have succeeded, or 
even how their project could have been started. The unity of the Empire was a 
condition precedent of all religious proselytism on a grand scale if it was to place 
itself above the nationalities." (Renan, E., Hibberl Lectures, 18S0; Influence of 
Rome on the Christian Church.) 

1 In Acts XXV, 1-12, it is recorded that the Apostle Paul, accused by the Jews 
and virtually on trial for his life before the provincial governor Festus, fell back on 
his Roman citizenship and successfully "appealed to Ctesar." (See footnote 3, page 
57-) 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 91 

equality with other forms of worship (R. 36). In 313 Constan- 
tine made it in part the official religion of the State, ^ and ordered 
freedom of worship for all. He and succeeding Emperors gradu- 
ally extended to the Christian clergy a long list of important 
privileges (R. 38) and exemptions,^ analogous to those formerly 
enjoyed by the teachers of rhetoric under the Empire (R. 26), 
and likewise began the policy, so liberally followed later, of en- 
dowing the Church. In 391 the Emperor Theodosius forbade all 
pagan worship, thus making the victory of Christianity complete. 
In less than four centuries from the birth of its founder the 
Christian faith had won control of the great Empire in which it 
originated. In 529 the Emperor Justinian ordered the closing of 
all pagan schools, and the University of Athens, which had re- 
mained the center of pagan thought after the success of Christian- 
ity, closed its doors. The victory was now complete. 

The contribution of Christianity. We have now before us the 
third great contribution upon which our modern civilization has 
been built. To the great contributions of Greece and Rome, 
which we have previously studied, there now was added, and 
added at a most opportune time, the contribution of Christianity. 
In taking the Jewish idea of one God and freeing it from the nar- 
row tribal limitations to which it had before been subject, Chris- 
tianity made possible its general acceptance, first in the Roman 
world, and later in the Mohammedan world. ^ With this was 
introduced the doctrine of the fatherhood of God and his love for 
man, the equality before God of all men and of the two sexes, and 
the sacredness of each individual in the eyes of the Father. An 
entirely new conception of the individual was proclaimed to the 
world, and an entirely new ethical code was promulgated. The 
duty of all to make their lives conform to these new conceptions 
was asserted. These ideas imparted to ancient society a new 

^ "The miracle of miracles, greater than dried-up seas and cloven rocks, greater 
than the dead rising again to life, was when the Augustus on his throne, Pontiff 
of the gods of Rome, himself a god to the subjects of Rome, bent himself to become 
the worshiper of a crucified provincial of his Empire." (Freeman, E. A., Periods 
of European History, p. 67.) 

- In 319 and 326 the clergy were exempted from all public burdens, and only the 
poor were to be admitted to the clergy. In 343 the clergy were exempted "from 
public burdens and from every disquietude of civil office." In 377 all clergy were 
exempted from personal taxes. (See R. 38.) 

' From the Roman world the idea has spread, through the Greek Catholic Church, 
to Greece, parts of the Balkans, and Russia; through the Roman Catholic Church 
to all western Europe and the two Americas; and through the Protestant churches 
which sprang from the Roman Catholic by secession, and the Mohammedan faith, 
to include almost all the world. Only among uncivilized tribes and in Asia do we 
find any great number of fundamentally different religious conceptions. 



92 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

hopefulness and a new energy which were not only of great 
importance in dealing with the downfall of civilization and the 
deluge of barbarism which were impending, but which have been 
of prime importance during all succeeding centuries. In time the 
church organization which was developed gradually absorbed all 
other forms of government, and became virtually the State during 
the long period of darkness known as the Middle Ages. 

It remains now to sketch briefly how the Church organized 
itself and became powerful enough to perform its great task dur- 
ing the Middle Ages, what educational agencies it developed, and 
to what extent these were useful. 

II. EDUCATIONAL AND GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION OF 
THE EARLY CHURCH 

Schooling of the early Church ; catechumenal instruction. The 

early churches were bound together by no formal bond of union, 
and felt little need for such. It was the belief of many that 
Christ would soon return and the world would end, hence there 
was little necessity for organization. There was also almost no 
system of belief. An acknowledgment of God as the Father, a 
repentance for past sins, a godly life, and a desire to be saved were 
vabout all that was expected of any one.^ The chief concern was 
the moral regeneration of society through the moral regeneration 
of converts. To accomplish this, in face of the practices of 
Roman society, a process of instruction and a period of probation 
for those wishing to join the faith soon became necessary. Jews, 
pagans, and the children of believers were thereafter alike sub- 
jected to this before full acceptance into the Church. At stated 
times during the week the probationers met for instruction in 
morality and in the psalmody of the Church (R. 39). These two 
subjects constituted almost the entire instruction, the period 
of probation covering two or three years. The teachers were 
merely the older and abler members of the congregation. 

This personal instruction became common everywhere in the 
early Church, and the training was known as catechumenal, that 
is, rudimentary, instruction. Two sets of catechumenal lectures 
have survived, which give an idea as to the nature of the instruc- 
tion. They cover the essentials of church practice and the reli- 

* Paul to the Romans (x, 9) stated the fundamentals of belief as follows: "If 
thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart 
that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 93 

gious life (Rs. 39, 40), It was dropped entirely in the conversion 
of the barbarian tribes. This instruction, and the preaching of 
the elders (presbyters, who later evolved into priests), constituted 
the formal schooling of the early converts to Christianity in Italy 
and the East. Such instruction was never known in England, and 
but little in Gaul. 

The life in the Church rnade a moral and emotional, rather than 
an intellectual appeal. In fact the early Christians felt but little 
need for the type of intellectual education provided by the 
Roman schools, and the character of the educated society about 
them, as they saw it, did not make them wish for the so-called 
pagan learning. Even if the parents of converts wished to pro- 
vide additional educational advantages for their children, what 
could they do? A modern author states well the predicament of 
such Christian parents, when he says: 

All the schools were pagan. Not only were all the ceremonies of the 
official faith — and more especially the festivals of Minerva, who was 
the patroness of masters and pupils — celebrated at regular intervals 
in the schools, but the children were taught reading out of books 
saturated with the old mythology. There the Christian child made 
his first acquaintance with the deities of Olympus. He ran the danger 
of imbibing ideas entirely contrary to those which he had received at 
home. The fables he had learned to detest in his own home were 
explained, elucidated, and held up to his admiration every day by his 
masters. Was it right to put him thus into two schools of thought? 
What could be done that he might be educated, like every one else, 
and yet not run the risk of losing his faith? ^ 

Catechetical schools. After Christianity had begun to make 
converts among the more serious-minded and better-educated 
citizens of the Roman Empire, the need for more than rudimen- 
tary instruction in the principles of the church life began to be 
felt. Especially was this the case in the places where Christian 
workers came in contact with the best scholars of the Hellenic 
learning, and particularly at Alexandria, Athens, and the cities 
of Asia Minor. The speculative Greek would not be satisfied 
with the simple, unorganized faith of the early Christians. He 
wanted to understand it as a system of thought, and asked many 
Ijuestions that were hard to answer. To meet the critical inquiry 
of learned Greeks, it became desirable that the clergy of the 
Church, in the East at least, should be equipped with a training 
similar to that of their critics. As a result there was finally 

^ M. Boissier. La Fin du Paganisme, vol. i, p. 200. 



94 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

evolved, first at Alexandria, and later at other places in the 
Empire, training schools for the leaders of the Church. 

These came to be known as catechetical schools, from their oral 
questioning method of instruction, and this term was later applied 
to elementary religious instruction (whence catechism) throughout 
western Europe. Pantaenus, a converted Greek Stoic, who became 
head of the catechumenal instruction at Alexandria, in 179 a.d., 
brought to the training of future Christian leaders the strength 
of Greek learning and Greek philosophic thought. He and his 
successors, Clement and Origen, developed here an important 
school of Christian theology where Greek learning was used to 
interpret the Scriptures and train leaders for the service of the 
Church. Similar schools were opened at Antioch, Edessa, Nisi- 
bis, and Caesarea (See Map, p. 89), and these developed into a 
rudimentary form of theological schools for the education of the 
eastern Christian clergy. In these schools Christian faith and 
doctrine were formulated into a sort of system, the whole being 
tinctured through and through with Greek philosophic thought. 
Out of these schools came some of the great Fathers of the early 
Church ; men who strove to uphold the pagan learning and recon- 
cile Christianity and Greek philosophic thinking.^ 

Rejection of pagan learning in the West. In the West, where 
the leaders of the Church came from the less philosophic and 
more practical Roman stock, and where the contact with a deca- 
dent society wakened a greater reaction, the tendency was to 
reject the Hellenic learning, and to depend more u pon emoti onal 
faith and the enforcement of a moral life. By the close of the 
third century the hostility to the pagan schools and to the Hel- 
lenic learning had here become pronounced (R. 41). Even the 
Fathers of the Latin Church, the greatest of whom had been 

' Justin Martyr (io5?-i67), a former Greek teacher and philosopher, continued 
to follow his profession, wear his Greek philosopher's garb, and held that the teach- 
ings of Christianity were already contained in Greek philosophy, and that Plato 
and Socrates were Christians before the coming of the Christian faith. 

Clement (c. i6o-c. 215), the successor of Pantasus as head of the catechetical 
school at Alexandria, held to the harmony of the Gospels with philosophy, and that 
"Plato was Moses Atticized." 

Origen (c. 185-c. 254), a pupil and successor of Clement, and the most learned of 
all the earl}' Christian Fathers, labored to harmonize the Christian faith with Greek 
learning and philosophy, and did much to formulate the dogmas of the early Church. 

Saint Basil (331-379) tried to allay the rising prejudice against pagan learning, 
and to show the helpfulness to the Christian life of the Greek Hterature and phi- 
losophy. 

Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330-c. 390) was filled with indignation and protested 
loudly at the closing of the pagan schools to Christians by the edict of the Emperor 
Julian, in 362. 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 95 

teachers of oratory or rhetoric in Roman schools before their 
conversion,^ gradually came to reject the pagan learning as unde- 
sirable for Christians and in a large degree as a robbery from God. 
Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, hopes that God may forgive 
him for having enjoyed Vergil. Jerome's dream - was known and 
quoted throughout the Middle Ages, TertuUian, in his Prescrip- 
tion against Heresies, exclaims : 

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is 
there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics 
and Christians? . . . Away with all attempts to produce a mottled 
Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition. 

Gregory the Great, Pope of the Church from 590 to 604, and 
who had been well educated as a youth in the surviving Roman- 
type schools, turned bitterly against the whole of pagan learning. 
'T am strongly of the opinion," he says, "that it is an indignity 
that the words of the oracle of Heaven should be restrained. by 
the rules of Donatus" (grammar). In a letter to the Bishop of 
Vienne he berates him for giving instruction in grammar, con- 
cluding with — "the praise of Christ cannot He in one mouth 
with the praise of Jupiter. Consider yourself what a crime it is 
for bishops to recite what would be improper for religiously- 
minded laymen." 

As a result Hellenic learning declined rapidly in importance in 
the West as the Church attained supremacy, and finally, in 401, 
the Council of Carthage, largely at the instigation of Saint Augus- 
tine, forbade the clergy to read any pagan author. In time 
Greek learning largely died out in the West, and was for a time 
almost entirely lost. Even the Greek language was forgotten, 
and was not known again in the West for nearly a thousand 
years.^ 

The Church perfects a strong organization. As was previously 
stated (p. 92), but little need was felt during the first two centu- 

^ TertuUian (c. 150-230) had been well educated in Greek literature and phi- 
losophy, and had attained distinction as a lawyer. Saint Jerome (c. 340-420) was 
saturated with pagan learning, but later advised against it. Saint Augustine (354- 
430), the master mind among the Latin Fathers, was for years a teacher of oratory 
and rhetoric in Roman schools, and had written part of an encyclopEedia on the 
liberal arts before his conversion. Many others who became prominent in the 
Western Church had in their earlier life been teachers in the Roman higher schools. 

2 Dreaming that he had died and gone to Heaven, he was asked, "Who art thou? " 
On replying, "A Christian," he heard the awful judgment, "It is false: thou art no 
Christian; thou art a Ciceronian; where the treasure is, there the heart is also." 

* The knowledge of Greek remained alive longer in Ireland than anywhere else in 
the western world, being known there as late as the seventh century. Greek was 
also preserved in parts of Spain for two centuries after it had died out in Italy. 



96 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



ries for a system of belief or church government. As the expected 
return of Christ did not take place, and as the need for a formula- 
tion of belief and a system of government began to be felt, the 
next step was the development of these features. The system 
of belief and the ceremonials of worship finally evolved are more 
the products of Greek thought and practices of the East, while 
the form of organization and government is derived more from 
Roman sources. In the second century the Old Testament was 
translated into Greek at Alexandria, and the 'Apostles' Creed" 
was formulated. During the third century the writings deemed 
sacred were organized into the New Testament, also in Greek. 
In 325 the first General Council of the Church was held at Nicaea, 
in Asia Minor. It formulated the Nicene Creed (R. 42), and 
twenty canons or laws for the government of the Church. A 
second General Council, held at Constantinople 
in 381, revised the Nicene Creed and adopted 
additional canons. 

The great organizing genius of the western 
branch of the Church was Saint Augustine (354- 
430). He gave to the Western or Latin Church, 
then beginning to take on its separate existence, 
the body of doctrine needed to enable it to put 
into shape the things for which it stood. The 
system of theology evolved before the separation 
of the eastern and western branches of the Church 
was not so finished and so finely speculative as 
that of the Greek branch, but was more prac- 
tical, more clearly legal, and more systematically 
organized. 

The influence of Rome was strong also in the 
organization of the system of government finally 
adopted for the Church. There being no other 
model, the Roman governmental system was 
copied. The bishop of a city corresponded to the 
Roman municipal officials; the archbishop of a 
territory to the governor of a province ; and the patriarch to the 
ruler of a division of the Empire. As Rome had been a uni- 
versal Empire, and as the city of Rome had been the chief gov- 
erning city,^ the idea of a universal Church was natural and the 

1 In the West there was no other great city than Rome. At the period of its 
maximum greatness, in the first century B.C., it was a city of approximately 450,00a 
people. 




Fig. 28. 
A Bishop 

Seventh Century 

(Santo Venanzio, 

Rome) 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 97 

supremacy of the Bishop of Rome was gradually asserted and 
determined.' 

A State within a State. There was thus developed in the West, 
as it were a State within a State. That is, within the Roman 
Empire, with its Emperor, provincial governors, and municipal 
officials, governing the people and drawing their power from the 
Roman Senate and imperial authority, there was also gradually 
developed another State, consisting of those who had accepted 
the Christian faith, and who rendered their chief allegiance, 
through priest, bishop, and archbishop, to a central head of the 
Church who owed allegiance to no earthly ruler. That Christian- 
ity, viewed from the governmental point of view, was a serious 
element of weakness in the Roman State and helped its downfall, 
there can be no question. In the eastern part of the Empire the 
Church was always much more closely identified with the State. 
Fortunately for civilization, before the Roman Empire had fallen 
and the impending barbarian deluge had descended, the Christian 
Church had succeeded in formulating a unifying belief and a form 
of government capable of commanding respect and of enforcing 
authority, and was fast taking over the power of the State itself. 

The cathedral or episcopal schools. The first churches through- 
out the Empire were in the cities, and made their early converts 
there. ^ Gradually these important cities evolved into the resi- 
dences of a supervising priest or bishop, the territory became 
known as a bishopri c, and the church as a cathedral church . In 
time, also, some of the outlying territory was organized into par- 
ishes, and churches were established in these. These were made 
tributary tb and pkced under the direction of the bishop of the 
large central city, 'to supply clergy for these outlying parishes 
came to be one of the functions of the bishop, and, to insure prop- 
erly trained clergy and to provide for promot4ons in the clerical 
ranks, schools of a rudimentary type were estabHshed in connec- 
tion with the cathedral churches. These came to be known as 
cathedral, or episcopal schools. At first they were probably under 
the immediate charge of the bishop, but later, as his functions 

^ After many struggles and conflicts between the Bishops of Constantinople. 
Alexandria, and Rome, the Bishop of Rome was finally recognized by the second 
great Church Council, held at Constantinople in 381, as the head of the entire 
Church (Canon 3), corresponding to the Emperor on the political side of the dying 
Empire. The separation of the eastern and western churches was rapid after this 
time. (See Map, p. 103.) 

^ The word pagan as applied to unbeliever illustrates this progress of the Church, 
being derived from the Latin paganus, meaning countryman, villager, rustic. 



98 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

increased, the school was placed under a special teacher, known 
as a Scholasticus, or Magister Scholarum, who directed the cathe- 
dral school, assisted the bishop, and trained the future clergy. 
As the pagan secondary schools died out, these cathedral schools, 
together with the monastic schools which were later founded, 
gradually replaced the pagan schools as the important educational 
institutions of the western world. In these two types of schools 
the religious leaders of the early Middle Ages were trained. 

The monastic organization. In the early days of Christianity, 
it will be remembered (p. 87), the Christian convert held himself 
apart from the wicked world all about him, and had little to do 
with the society or the government of his time. He regarded the 
Church as having no relationship to the State. As the Church 
grew stronger, however, and became a State within a State, the 
Christian took a larger and larger part in the world around him, 
and in time came to be distinguished from other men by his pro- 
fession of the Christian religion rather than by any other mark. 
Many of the early bishops were men of great political sagacity, 
fully capable of realizing to the full the political opportunities, 
afforded by their position, to strengthen the power of the Church. 
It was the work of men of this type that created the temporal 
power of the Church, and made of it an institution capable of 
commanding respect and enforcing its decisions. 

To some of the early Christians this life did not appeal. To 
them holiness was associated with a complete withdrawal from 
contact with this sinful world and all its activities. Some betook 
themselves to the desert, others to the forests or mountains, and 
others shut themselves up alone that they might be undisturbed 
in their religious meditations. To such devoted souls monasti- 
cism, a scheme of living brought into the Christian world from 
the East, made a strong appeal. It provided that such men 
should live together in brotherhoods, renouncing the world, taking 
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and devoting their 
lives to hard labor and the mortification of the flesh that the soul 
might be exalted and made beautiful. The members lived alone 
in individual cells, but came together for meals, prayer, and 
religious service. 

As early as 330 a monastery, had been organized on the island 
of Tebernee, in the Nile. About 350 Saint Basil introduced mo- 
nasticism into Asia Minor, where it flourished greatly. In 370 the 
Basilian order was founded. The monastic idea was soon trans- 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 



99 



ferred to the West, a monastery being established at Rome prob- 
ably as early as 340. The m.onastery of Saint Victor, at Mar- 
seilles, was founded by Cassian in 404, and this type of monastery 
and monastic rule was introduced into Gaul, about 415. The 
monastery of Lerins (off Cannes, in southern France) was estab- 
lished in 405. During the fifth century a rapid extension of mo- 
nastic foundations took place in western Europe, particularly along 





Fig. 29. A Benedictine Monk, Abbot, and Abbess 
(From a thirteenth-centut}' manuscript) 

the valleys of the Rhone and the Loire in Gaul, In 529 Saint 
Benedict, a Roman of wealth who fled from the corruption of his 
city, founded the monastery of Monte Cassino, south of Rome, 
and established a form of government, or rule of daily life, which 
was gradually adopted by nearly all the monasteries of the West. 
In time Europe came to be dotted with thousands of these estab- 
lishments, many of which were large and expensive institutions 
both to found and to maintain.^ By the time the barbarian inva- 
sions were in full swing monasticism had become an established 
institution of the Christian Church. Nunneries for women also 
were established early. A letter from Saint Jerome to Marcella, 
a Roman matron, in 382, in which he says that " no high-born lady 
at Rome had made profession of the monastic life ... or had 
i^entured . . . publicly to call herself a nun," would seem to imply 
that such institutions had already been established in Rome. 

* See the accompanying Book of Readings for a drawing and detailed explanation 
of the monastery of Saint Gall, in Switzerland (R. 69). This was one of the most 
important monasteries of the Middle Aj^cs. 



100 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Monastic schools. Poverty, chastity, obedience, labor, and 
religious devotion were the essential features of a monastic life. 
The Rule of Saint Benedict (R. 43) organized in a practical way 
the efforts of those who took the -vows. In a series of seventy- 
three rules which he laid down, covering all phases of monastic 
life, the most important from the standpoint of posterity was the 
forty-eighth, prescribing at least seven hours of daily labor and two 
hours of reading "for all able to bear the load." From that part 
of the rule requiring regular manual labor the monks became the 
most expert farmers and craftsmen of the early Middle Ages, while 
to the requirement of daily reading we owe in lar^e part the devel- 
opment of the school and the preservation of learning in the West 
during the long intellectual night of the mediaeval period (R. 44). 

Into these monastic institutions the ohlati, that is, those who 
wished to become monks, were received as early as the age of 
twelve, and occasionally earlier (R. 53 a) . The final vows (R. 53 b) 
could not be taken until eighteen, so during t^is period the novice 
was taught to work and to read and write, given instruction in 
church music, and taught^o calculate the church festivals and 
to do simple reckoning. In time some condensed and carefully 
edited compendium of the elements of classical learning was also 
studied, and still later a more elaborate type of instruction was 
developed in some of the monasteries. This, however, belongs 
to a later division of this history, and further description of 
church and monastic education will be deferred until we study 
the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. 

The education of girls. Aside from the general instruction in 
the practices of the church and home instruction in the work of 2 
woman, there was but little provision made for the education of 
girls not desiring to join a convent or nunnery. A few, however, 
obtained a limited amount of intellectual training. The letter of 
Saint Jerome to the Roman lady Paula (R. 45), regarding the 
education of her daughter, is a very important document in the 
history of early Christian education for girls. Dating from 403, it 
outlines the type of training a young girl should be given who 
was to be properly educated in Christian faith and properly con- 
secrated to God. What he outlined was education for nunneries, 
a number of which had been founded in the East and a few in the 
West. In the West these institutions later experienced an exten- 
sive development, and offered the chief opportunity for any intel- 
lectual education for women during the whole of the Middle Ages. 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY loi 

III. WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES STARTED WITH 

What the Church brought to the Middle Ages. From a small 
and purely spiritual organization, devoting its energies to exhorta- 
tion and to the moral regeneration of mankind, and without creed 
or form of government, as the Christian Church was in the first 
two centuries of its development, wejiave traced the organization 
of a body of doctrine, the perfection of a strong system of church 
government, and the development of a very limited educational 
system designed merely to train leaders for its service. We have 
also shown how it added to its early ecclesiastical organization a 
strong governmental organization, became a State within a State, 
and gradually came to direct the State itself. It was thus ready, 
when the virtual separation of the Roman Empire into an eastern 
and western division took place, in 395, and when the western 
division finally fell before the barbarian onslaughts, to take up 
in a way the work of the State, force the barbarian hordes to 
acknowledge its power, and begin the process of civilizing these 
new tribes and building up once more a civilization in the western 
world. In addition to its spiritual and political power, the Church 
also had developed, in its catechumenal instruction and in the 
cathedral and monastic schools, a very meager form of an educa- 
tional system for the training of its future leaders and servants. 
A great change had now taken place in the nature of education as 
a preparation for life, and intellectual education, in the sense that 
it was known and understood in Greece and Rome, was not to be 
known again in the western world for almost a thousand years. 
The distinguishing characteristic of the centuries which follow, 
up to the Revival of Learning, are, first, a struggle against very 
adverse odds to prevent civilization from disappearing entirely, 
and later a struggle to build up new foundations upon which world 
civilization might begin once more where it had left off in Greece 
and Rome. 

The three great contributions from the ancient world. Thus, 
before the Middle Ages began, the three great contributions of 
the ancient world which were to form the foundations of our 
future western civilization had been made. Greece gave the 
world an art and a philosophy and a literature of great charm and 
beauty, the most advanced intellectual and aesthetic ideas that 
civilization has inherited, and developed an educational system 
of wonderful effectiveness — one that in its higher developnimt 



102 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

in time took captive the entire Mediterranean world and pro- 
foundly modified all later thinking. Rome was the organizing 
and legal genius of the ancient world, as Greece was the literary 
and philosophical. To Rome we are especially indebted for om 
conceptions of law, order, and government, and for the ability 
to make practical and carry into effect the ideals of other peoples. 
To the Hebrews we are indebted for the world's loftiest concep- 
tions of God, religious faith, and moral responsibility, and to 
Christianity and thq Church we are indebted for making these 
ideas universal in the Roman Empire and forcing them on a 
barbaric world. 

All these great foundations of our western civilization have not 
come down to us directly. The hostility to pagan learning that 
developed on the part of the Latin Fathers; the establishment of 
an eastern capital for the Empire at Constantinople, in 328; the 
virtual division of the Empire into an East and West, in 395 ; and 
the final division of the Christian Church into a Western Latin 
and an Eastern Greek Church, which was gradually effected, 
finally drove Greek philosophy and learning and the Greek lan- 
guage from the western world. Greek was not to be known again 
in the West for hundreds of years. Fortunately the Eastern 
Church was more tolerant of pagan learning than was the West- 
ern, and was better able to withstand conquest by barbarian 
tribes. In consequence what the Greeks had done was preserved 
at Constantinople until Europe had once more become sufficiently 
civilized and tolerant to understand and appreciate it. Hellenic 
learning was then handed back to western Europe, first through 
the medium of the Saracens, and then in that great Revival of 
Learning which we know as the Renaissance. Of the Latin liter- 
ature and learning much was lost, and much was preserved almost 
by accident in the monasteries of mediaeval Europe. Even the 
Church itself was seriously deflected from its earlier purpose and 
teachings during the long period of barbarism and general igno- 
rance through which it passed, and only in modern times has it 
tried to come back to the spirit of the teachings of its founder. 

The future story. For the long period of intellectual stagnation 
which now followed, the educational story is briefly told. But 
little formal education was needed, and that of but one main type. 
It was only after the Church had won its victory over the bar- 
barian hordes, and had built up the foundations upon which a 
new civilization could be developed, that education in any broad 




Fig. 30. Showing the Final Division of the Empire and the Church 

The map also shows conditions as they were in Europe at the end of the fourth 
century a.d. Syria, Egypt, Africa, and a portion of Asia Minor were overwhelmed 
by the Saracens in the seventh century and became Mohammedan, but Constanti- 
nople held out until 1453. The eastern division eventually gave rise to the Greek 
Catholic Church of Greece, the Balkans, and Russia, while the western division 
became the Roman Catholic Church of western Europe. At Constantinople Greek 
learning was preserved until the West was again ready to receive it. The Eastern 
Empire for a time retained control of Sicily and southern Italy (the old Magna 
Grcecia), but eventually these were absorbed by western or Latin Christianity. 



104 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and liberal sense was again needed. This required nearly a thou- 
sand years of laborious and painful effort. Then, when schools 
again became possible and learning again began to be demanded, 
education had to begin again with the few at the top, and the 
contributions of Greece and Rome had to be recovered and put 
into usable form as a basis upon which to build. It is only 
very recently that it has become possible to extend education to 
all. 

In Part II we shall next trace briefly the intellectual life of the 
Middle Ages, and the reawakening, and in Part III we shall, 
among other things, point out the deep and lasting influence of 
the work of these ancient civilizations on our modern educa- 
tional thoughts and practices. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Point out the many advantages of a universal religion for such a univer- 
sal Empire as Rome developed, and the advantages of Emperor worship 
for such an Empire. 

2. What do modern nations have that is much akin to Emperor worship? 

3. Explain why Stoicism made such an appeal to the better-educated 
classes at Rome. 

4. Why is an emotional faith better adapted to the mass of people than an 
intellectual one? 

5. Explain how the Hebrew scribes, administering such a mixed body of 
laws, naturally came to be both teachers and judges for the people. 

6. Illustrate how the Hebrew tradition that the moral and spiritual unity 
of a people is stronger than armed force has been shown to be true in 
history. 

7. What great lessons may we draw from the work of the Hebrews in main- 
taining a national unity through compulsory education? 

8. Why was Jesus' idea as to the importance of the individual destined to 
make such slow headway in the world? What is the status of the idea 
to-day (a) in China? (b) in Germany? (c) in England? (d) in the 
United States? Is the idea necessarily opposed to nationaHty or even 
to a strong state government? 

9. Show how the political Church, itself the State, was the natural outcome 
during the Middle Ages of the teachings of the early Christians as to the 
relationship of Church and State. 

10. Is it to be wondered that the Romans were finally led to persecute "the 
vast organized defiance of law by the Christians"? 

11. Show how the Christian idea of the equality and responsibiUty of all 
gave the citizen a new place in the State. 

12. State the reasons for the gradually increasing lack of sympathy and 
understanding between the eastern and western Fathers of the Church, 
and which finally led to the division of the Church. 

13. Explain what is meant by "a State within a State" as applied to the 
Church of the third and fourth centuries. Did this prove to be a good 
thing for the future of civilization? Why? 

14. Would Rome probably have been better able to withstand the barbarian 
invasions if Christianity had not arisen, or not? Why? 



CONTRIBUTION OF CHRISTIANITY 105 

15. Show how the Christian attitude toward pagan learning tended to stop 
schools and destroy the accumulated learning. 

16. What was the effect of the Christian attitude toward the care of the body, 
on scientific and medical knowledge, and on education? Was the Chris- 
tian or the pagan attitude more nearly like that of modern times? 

17. Why did the emphasis on form of behef, in the third and fourth centuries, 
come to supersede the emphasis on personal virtues and simple faith of 
the first and second centuries? 

18. Compare the work of the Sunday School of to-day with the catechumenal 
instruction of the early Christians. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

27. The Talmud: Educational Maxims from. 

28. Saint Paul: Epistle to the Romans. 

29. Saint Paul: To the Athenians. 

30. The Crimes of the Christians. 

(a) Minucius Felix: The Roman Point of View. 
(5) Tertullian: The Christian Point of View. 

31. Persecution of the Christians as Disloyal Subjects of the Empire. 

(o) Pliny to Trajan. 
{h) Trajan to Pliny. 

32. Tertullian: Effect of the Persecutions. 

33. Eusebius: Edicts of Diocletian against the Christians. 

34. Workman: Certificate of having Sacrificed to the Pagan Gods. 

35. Kingsley: The Empire and Christianity in Conflict. 

36. Lactantius: The Edict of Toleration by Galerius. 

37. Theodosian Code: The Faith of Catholic Christians. 

38. Theodosian Code: Privileges and Immunities granted the Clergy. 

39. Apostohc Constitutions: How the Catechumens are to be instructed. 

40. Leach: Catechumenal Schools of the Early Church. 

41. Apostohc Constitutions: Christians should abstain from all Heathen 

Books. 

42. The Nicene Creed of 325 a.d. 

43. Saint Benedict: Extracts from the Rule of. 

44. Lanfranc: Enforcing Lenten Reading in the Monasteries. 

45. Saint Jerome: Letter on the Education of Girls. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Characterize the type of education to be provided and the status of 
the teacher, as shown in the selections from the Talmud (27). Compare 
with Rome. With Athens. 

2. Characterize the attitude of Saint Paul toward the Romans (28). Does 
his description of Athens (29) tally with the description of the Athenians 
given in the text? 

3. Was it possible for the Roman and the Christian to understand one 
another, thinking as they did in such different terms (30 a-b)? 

4. Considering Phny and Trajan (31 a-b) as Roman officials, with the 
Roman point of view, and taking into account the time in the history of 
world civilization, would you say that they were quite tolerant of rebels 
within the State? 



J 



io6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

5. Compare the privileges and immunities granted the clergy (38) with the 
privileges previously given by Constantine to physicians and teachers 
(26) 

6. Characterize the irrepressible conflict as pictured by Kingsley (35). 
Name a few other somewhat similar conflicts in world histor3^ 

7. Outline the type of instruction for catechumens as directed in the 
Apostolic Constitutions (39). 

8. What would have been the effect of the continued rejection of secular 
books called for in the ApostoHc Constitutions (41)? 

9. What was the governmental advantage of the adoption of the Nicene 
Creed (42)? 

zo. Why did the rule of Saint Benedict (43) requiring readings and study 
lead to the copying and preservation of manuscripts? 

Ti. What does the selection from Lanfranc (44) indicate as to the state of 
monastic learning? 

12. Was there anything pedagogically sound about the letter of Saint Jerome 
(45) on the education of girls? Discuss. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

* Dill, Sam'I. Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. 
Fisher, Geo. P. Beginnings of Christianity. 

* Fisher, Geo. P. History of the Christian Church. 

* Hatch, Edw. Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian 

Church. (Hibbert Lectures, 1888.) 
Hodgson, Geraldine. Primitive Church Education. 
Kretzmann, P. E. Education among the Jews. 
MacCabe, Joseph. Saint Augustine. 

* Monro. D. C. and Sellery, G. E. Mediceval Civilization. 

* Swift, F. H. Education in Ancient Israel to 70 a.d. 
Taylor, H. O. Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages. 
Wishart, A. W. Short History of Monks and Monasticism. 



PART II 
THE MEDI/E\ AL WORLD 

THE DELUGE OF BARBARISM 

THE MEDIEVAL STRUGGLE TO PRESERVE 
AND REESTABLISH CIVILIZATION 



CHAPTER V 
NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE 

The weakened Empire. Though the first and second centuries 
A.D. have often been called one of the happiest ages in all human 
history, due to a succession of good Emperors and peace and quiet 
throughout the Roman world/ the reign of the last of the good 
Emperors, Marcus Aurelius (161-180 a.d.), may be regarded as 
clearly marking a turning-point in the history of Roman society. 
Before his reign Rome was ascendant, prosperous, powerful; 
during his reign the Empire was beset by many difficulties — 
pestilence, floods, famine, troubles with the Christians, and 
heavy German inroads — to which it had not before been accus- 
tomed; and after his reign the Empire was distinctly on the 
defensive and the decline. Though the elements contributing 
to this change in national destiny had their origin in the changes 
in the character of the national life at least two centuries earlier, 
it was not until now that the Empire began to feel seriously the 
effects of these changes in a lowered vitality and a weakened 
power of resistance. 

The virtues of the citizens of the early days of the Republic, 
trained according to the old ideas, had gradually given way in the 
face of the vices and corruption which beset and sapped the life 
of the upper and ruling classes in the later Empire. The failure 
of Rome to put its provincial government on any honest and 
efficient civil-service basis, the failure of the State to establish 
and direct an educational system capable of serving as a correc- 

^ The period from the reign of Augustus Caesar through that of Marcus Aurelius 
(31 B.C.-192 A.D.) was known as "the good Roman peace." No other large section 
of the western world has ever known such unbroken peace and prosperity for so 
long a time. Piracy ceased upon the seas, and trade and commerce flourished. 
The cities and the great middle class in the population were prosperous. Travel was 
safe and common, and men traveled both for business and pleasure. The Christian 
State within a State had not yet taken form. Literature and learning flourished. 
The law became milder. The rights of the accused became better recognized. A 
certain broad humanity pervaded the administration of both law and government. 
There was much private charity. Hospitals were established. Women were given 
greater freedom, larger intellectual advantages, and a better position in the home 
than they were to know again until the nineteenth century. It was the Golden Age 
of the Empire. Toward the close of the period the Christian Father, TertuUian, 
wrote: "Every day the world becomes more beautiful, more wealthy, more splendid. 
No comer remains inaccessible. . . . Recent deserts bloom. . . . Forests give way to 
tilled acres. . . . Everywhere are houses, people, cities. Everywhere there is life." 



no 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



tive of dangerous national tendencies, the lack of a guiding na- 
tional faith, the gradual admission of so many Germans into the 
Empire, the great extent and demoralizing influence of slavery ^ 
— all contributed to that loss of national strength and resisting 
power which was now becoming increasingly evident. Other 
contributing elements of importance were the almost complete 
obliteration of the peasantry by the creation of great landed 
estates and cattle ranches worked by slaves, in place of the small 
farms of earlier days; the increase of the poor in the cities, and 

the declining birth-rate; the in- 
troduction of large numbers of 
barbarians as farmers and sol- 
diers; and the demoralization of 
the city rabble by political lead- 
ers in need of votes. Captured 
slaves performed almost every 
service, and a lavish display of 
wealth on the part of a few came 
to be a characteristic feature of 
city life.^ The great middle, com- 
mercial, and professional classes 
were still prosperous and con- 
tented, but luxury, imported 
vices, slavery, political corrup- 
tion, and new ideals ^ had grad- 
ually sapped the old national 
vitality and destroyed the resisting power of the State in the 
face of a great national calamity. Rome now stood, much like 

^ Slavery in Rome came to be much more demoralizing than ever was the case 
in the United States. Instead of an ignorant people of an inferior race, the Roman 
slave was often the superior of his master — the unfortunate captive in an unsuccess- 
ful war against an oppressor. The holding of such educated and intelligent people 
in slavery was far more degrading to a ruhng people than would have been the case 
had their slaves been ignorant and of inferior racial stock. 

^ The Roman State had come to be essentially a collection of cities. Rome, 
Alexandria, Antioch, Corinth, Carthage, Ephesus, and Lyons were great cities, 
judged even by present-day standards, throbbing with varied industries and a 
strong intellectual life. In addition there were hundreds of other cities scattered all 
over the Empire, each with its own municipal life, while on the frontier were stock- 
aded villages serving as centers of trade with the barbarian tribes beyond. 

^ Chief among the new ideals that sapped the old Roman strength must be men- 
tioned the new Christian religion, with its doctrine of other-worldliness and its sys- 
tem of government not responsible to the Empire. Another influence was the rise 
of a super-civic philosophy, derived chiefly from the writings of Plato (see footnote i, 
page 42), which held that certain men could be above the State and yet by their 
wisdom in part direct it. The two influences combined to undermine the resisting 
strength of the State. 




Fig. 31. a Bodyguaed of Germans 

A relief from the Column of Marcus 
Aurelius, at Rome, erected to celebrate 



his victories over the Marcomanni 
other German tribes. 



and 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE in 

the shell of a fine old tree, apparently in good condition, but in 
reality ready to fall before the blast because it had been allowed 
to become rotten at the heart. Sooner or later the boundaries of 
the Empire, which had held against the pressure from without for 
so long, were destined to be broken and the barbarian deluge from 
the north and east would pour over the Empire. 

The boundaries of the Empire are broken. While temporary 
extensions of territory had at times been made beyond the 
Rhine and the Danube, these rivers had finally come to be the 
established boundaries of the Empire on the north, and behind 
these rivers the Teutonic barbarians, or Germani, as the Romans 
called them, had by force been kept. To do even this the Romans 
had been obliged to admit bands of Germans into the Empire, and 
had taken them into the Roman army as "allies," making use of 
their great love for fighting to hold other German tribes in check. 
In i66 A.D. the plague, brought back by soldiers returning from the 
East, carried off approximately half the population of Italy. This 
same year the Marcomanni (see Figure i8), a former friendly 
tribe, invaded the Empire as far as the head of the Adriatic Sea, 
and it required thirteen years of warfare to put them back behind 
the Danube. Even this was accomplished only by the aid of 
friendly German tribes. From this time on the Empire was more 
or less on the defensive, with the barbarian tribes to the north 
casting increasingly longing eyes toward " a place in the sun" and 
the rich plunder that lay to the south, and frequently breaking 
over the boundaries. Rome, though, was still strong enough to 
put them back again. 

In 275 A.D., after a five years' struggle, the Eastern Emperor 
gave the province of Dacia, to the south of the Danube, to the 
Visigoths, in an effort to buy them off from further invasion and 
warfare. This eased the pressure for another century. In 378 
A.D., now pressed on by the terrible Huns from behind, the Visi- 
goths, as a body, invaded the Eastern Empire, and in the Battle 
of A(irianople, near Constantinople, defeated the Roman army, 
slew the Roman Emperor, definitely broke the boundaries of the 
Empire, and they and the Ostrogoths now moved southward and 
settled in Moesia and Thrace. The Germans at Adrianople 
learned that they could beat the Roman legions, and from this 
time on it was they, and not the Romans, who named the terms 
of ransom and the price of peace. A few years later, under 
^Jaric . the Visigoths invaded Greece, then turned westward 



112 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



through Illyria to the valley of the Po, in northern Italy, which 
they reached in the year 400. In 410 the great calamity came 
when they captured and sacked Rome, The effect produced on 
the Roman world by the fall of the Eternal City, as the news of 
the almost incredible disaster penetrated to the remote provinces, 
was profound (R. 48). For eight hundred years Rome had not 




LOCATION 

Small Type 



Fig. 32. The German Migrations 

The barriers of the Empire along the Rhine and the Danube now are broken down. 
Take a pencil and trace the route followed by each of these peoples. 

been touched by foreign hands, and now it had been captured and 
plundered by barbarian hordes. It seemed to many as though 
the end of the world were approaching. The Visigoths now 
turned west once more, carrying with them the beautiful sister 
of the Emperor as a captive bride of the chief, and finally settled 
in Spain and southern Gaul, which provinces were thenceforth 
lost to Rome. This was the first of the great permanent inroads 
into the Empire, and from now on Roman resistance seemed 
powerless to stop the flood. 

A period of tribal movements. The Hunnish pressure also 
started the Vandals and Suevi, and within fifty years they had 
been able to move across Germany, France, and Spain, plunder- 
ing the cities on their way. Finally they crossed to the northern 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE 113 

coast of Africa, where they became noted as the great sea pirates 
of the Mediterranean. In 455 they crossed back to Italy, and 
Rome was sacked for the second time by barbarian hordes. The 
Huns, under the leadership of Attila, the so-called "Scourge of 
God," now moved in and ravaged Gaul (451) and northern Italy 
(452), and then, at the intercession of the Roman Pope Leo, were 
induced by a ransom price to return to the lower Danube, where 
they have since remained. In 476 the barbarian soldiers of the 
Empire, tired of camp life and demanding land on which they too 
might settle, rose in revolt, displaced the last of the Western 
Emperors, and elevated Odovacar, a tribesman from the north, 
as ruler in his stead. The Western Roman Empire was now at an 
end. In 493 Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, became king 0/ 
Italy. 

Between 443 and 485 the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes left their 
earlier homes in what is now Denmark and northwestern Ger- 
many, and overran eastern and southern Britain. In 486 the 
Franks, a great nation living along the lower Rhine, began to 
move, and within two generations had overrun almost all of Gaul. 
In 586 the Lombards invaded and settled the valleys of northern 
Italy, displacing the Ostrogoths there. Slavic tribes now moved 
into the Eastern Empire — Serbs and Bulgars — and settled in 
Moesia and Thrace. Southeastern Europe thus became Slavic- 
Greek, as western Europe had become Teutonic-Latin. Figure 
32 shows the results of these different migrations up to about 

500 A.D. 

Europe to be Teutonic-Latin. In the seventh century another 
great wave of people, of a different racial stock and religion — 
Semitic and Mohammedan — starting from Arabia and along the 
shores of the Red Sea, swept rapidly through Egypt and Africa 
and across into Spain and France. For a time it looked as though 
they might overrun all western Europe and bring the German 
tribes under subjection. Fortunately they were definitely stopped 
and decisively defeated by the Franks, in the great Battle of 
Tours, in 732. They also overran Syria and Persia, but were 
held in check in Asia Minor by the Eastern Empire, which did not 
completely succumb to barbarian inroads until Constantinople 
was taken by the Turks, in 1453. 

The importance of the result, to the future of our western civili- 
zation, of this battle in the West can hardly be overestimated. 
The future of European government, law, education, and civiliza- 



114 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



tion was settled on that Saturday afternoon in October, on the 
battle plains of Tours. ^ It was a struggle for mastery and domin- 
ion between the Aryan and Semitic races, between the Christian 
and Mohammedan religions, between the forces representing order 
on the one side and destruction on the other, and between races 
destined to succeed to the civilization of Greece and Rome 
and a race representing oriental despotism and static conditions. 




[ \ Christian 

I Mohammedan 



ijJEuropean Heathen 



Fig. 33. The Known World nsr 800 

This map shows the great extent of the Mohammedan conquests. The part 
marked as "European Heathen" was added to Christianity within the next few 
centuries, and became a part of our Latin-Teutonic or western civilization. 

Driven back across the Pyrenees by the Franks, these people 
settled in Spain; later developed there, for a short period, a for- 

^ Not only was the future of western European civilization settled there, but that 
of North and South America as well. Had Saracenic civilization come to dominate 
Europe, the Koran might have been taught to-day in the theological schools of 
Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, and Valparaiso, and the 
Christian religion been the possession only of the Greek and Russian churches, 
while our literature and philosophy and civilization would have been tinctured, 
through and through, with oriental ideas and Mohammedan conceptions. 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE 



T15 



the- time remarkable civilization, but one that only slightly influ- 
enced the current of European development ; and then disappeared 
as a force in our western development and progress. We shall 
meet them again a Httle later, but only for a little while, and then 
they concern our western development no more. 

Our interest from now on lies with the Teutonic-Latin peoples 
of western Europe, for it is through them that our western civili- 
zation has been worked out and has come down to us. 

Who these invaders were. A long-continued series of tribal 
migrations, unsurpassed before in history, had brought a large 
number of new peoples within the boundaries of the old Empire. 
They finally came so fast that they could not have been assim- 
ilated even in the best days of Rome, and now 
the assimilative and digestive powers of Rome 
were gone. Tall, huge of limb, white-skinned, 
flaxen-haired, with fierce blue eyes, and clad in 
skins and rude cloths, they seemed like giants 
to the short, small, dark-skmned people of the 
Italian peninsula. Quarrelsome; delighting in 
fighting and gambling; given to drunkenness 
and gluttonous eating; possessed of a rude 
polytheistic religion in which Woden, the war 
god, held the first place, and VaUialla was a 
heaven for those killed in battle; living in rude 
villages in the forest, and maintaining them- 
selves by hunting and fishing — it is not to 
be wondered that Rome dreaded the coming 
of these forest barbarians (R. 46). 

The tribes nearest the Rhine and the Danube 
had taken on a little civilization from long 
contact with the Romans, but those farther 
away were savage and unorganized (Rs. 46, 47) . 
In general they represented a degree of civili- 
zation not particularly different from that of 
the better American Indians in our colonial 
period,^ though possessing a much larger ability to learn. The 
"two terrible centuries" which brought these new peoples into the 

I It is hard for us to imagine what happened, for the Indians we know to-day 
represent a much higher grade of civilization than did the German invaders. If 
we could imagine the United States overrun by the Indians of a hundred and fifty 
years ago, as the German tribes overran the Roman Empire, and becoming the 
rulers of a people superior to them in numbers and intellect, we should have some- 
thing analogous to the Roman situation. 




Fig. 34. A German 
War CmEF 

Restored, and rather 

idealized 

(From the Musee 

d'Artillerie at Paris) 



116 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 35. Romans destroying a German Village 

(From the Column of Marcus Aurelius, at Rome) 

Note the circular huts of reeds, without windows, and 

with but a single door. 



Empire were marked by unspeakable disorder and frightful de- 
struction. It was the most complete catastrophe that had ever 
befallen civilized society. 

They settle down within the Empire. Finally, after a period 
of wandering and plundering, each of these new peoples settled 

down within the Em- 
pire as rulers over the 
numerically larger na- 
tive Roman popula- 
tion, and slowly began 
to turn from hunting 
to a rude type of 
farming. For three 
or four centuries after 
the invasions ceased^ 
though, Europe pre- 
sented a dreary spec- 
tacle of ignorance, 
lawlessness, and vio- 
lence. Force reigned 
where law and order had once been supreme. Work largely ceased, 
because there was no security for the results of labor. The Roman 
schools gradually died out, in part because of pagan hostility (all 
pagan schools were closed by imperial edict in 529 a.d.), and in part 
because they no longer ministered to any real need. The church 
and the monastery schools alone remained, the instruction in 
these was meager indeed, and they served almost entirely the 
special needs of the priestly and monastic classes. The Latin 
language was corrupted and modified into spoken dialects, and 
the written language died out except with the monks and the 
clergy. Even here it became greatly corrupted. Art perished, 
and science disappeared. The former Roman skill in handicrafts 
was largely lost. Roads and bridges were left without repair. 
Commerce and intercourse almost ceased. The cities decayed, 
and many were entirely destroyed (R. 49). 

The new ruling class was ignorant — few could read or write 
their names — and they cared little for the learning of Greece and 
Rome. Much of what was excellent in the ancient civilizations 
died out because these new peoples were as yet too ignorant to 
understand or use it, and what was preserved was due to the work 
of others than themselves. It was with such people and on sue' 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE 117 

a basis that it was necessary for whatever constructive forces still 
remained to begin again the task of building up new foundations 
for a future European civilization. This was the work of centu- 
ries, and during the period the lamp of learning almost went out. 
Barbarian and Roman in contact. Civilization was saved from 
almost complete destruction chiefly by reason of the long and sub- 
stantial work which Rome had done in organizing and governing 
and unifying the Empire; by the relatively slow and gradual 
coming of the different tribes; and by the thorough organization 
of the governing side of the Christian Church, which had been 
effected before the Empire was finally overrun and Roman govern- 
ment ceased. In unifying the government of the Empire and 
establishing a common law, language, and traditions, and in early 
beginning the process of receiving barbarians into the Empire 
and educating them in her ways and her schools,^ Rome rendered 
the western world a service of inestimable importance and one 
which did much to prepare the way for the reception and assimil- 
ation of the invaders." In the cities, which remained Roman in 
spirit even after their rulers had changed, and where the Roman 
population greatly preponderated even after the invaders had 
come, some of the old culture and handicrafts were kept up, and 
in the cities of southern Europe the municipal form of city govern- 
ment was retained. Roman law still applied to trials of Roman 
citizens, and many Roman governmental forms passed over to 
the invader chiefly because he knew no other. The old Roman 
population for long continued to furnish the clergy, and these, 
because of their ability to read and write, also became the secre- 
taries and advisers of their rude Teutonic overlords. In one 
capacity or another they persuaded the leaders of the tribes to 
adopt, not only Christianity, but many of the customs and prac- 
tices of the old civilization as well. These various influences 

^ As allies, citizens, soldiers, colonists, and slaves the Germans had long been 
filtering into the Roman world, and the Roman world was in part Germanized before 
the barriers were broken. These German-Romans helped to assimilate the Germans 
who came later, much as Italian-Americans in the United States help to receive and 
assimilate new Italians when they come. 

^ "The historical importance of the mere fact that it was an organic unity which 
Rome established, and not simply a collection of fragments artificially held together 
by military force, that the civilized world was made, as it were, one nation, cannot 
be overstated. ... It was a union, not in externals merely, but in every department 
of thought and action; and it was so thorough, and the Gaul became so completely 
a Roman, that when the Roman government disappeared he had no idea of being 
anything else than a Roman. ... It was because of this that, despite the fall of 
Rome, Roman institutions were perpetual." (Adams, G. B., Civilization during the 
Middle Ages, 2d ed., p. 30.) 



Il8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

helped to assimilate and educate the newcomers, and to save 
something of the old civilization for the future. Being strong, 
sturdy, and full of youthful energy, and with a large capacity for 
learning, the civilizing process, though long and difficult, was 
easier than it might otherwise have been, and because of their 
strength and vigor these new races in time infused new life and 
energy into every land from Spain to eastern Europe (R. 50). 

The most powerful force with which the barbarians came in 
contact, though, and the one which did most to reduce them to 
civilization, was the Christian Church. Organized, as we have 
seen, after the Roman governmental model, and as a State within 
a State, the Church gained in strength as the Roman government 
grew weaker, and was ready to assume governmental authority 
when Rome could no longer exert it. The barbarians here en- 
countered an organization stronger than force and greater than 
kings, ^ which they must either accept and make terms with or 
absolutely destroy. As all the tribes, though heathen, possessed 
some form of spirit or nature worship or heathen gods, which 
served as a basis for understanding the appeal of the Church, 
the result was the ultimate victory, and the Christianizing, in 
name at least, of all the barbarian tribes. This was the first step 
in the long process of civilizing and educating them. 

The impress of Christianity upon them. The importance ot 
the services rendered by bishops, priests, and monks during what 
are known as the Dark Ages can hardly be overestimated. In 
the face of might they upheld the right of the Church and its 
representatives to command obedience and respect.^ The Chris- 
tian priest gradually forced the barbarian chief to do his will, 
though at times he refused to be awed into submission, murdered 
the priest, and sacked the sacred edifice. That the Church lost 
much of its early purity of worship, and adopted many practices 
fitted to the needs of the time, but not consistent with real reli- 
gion, there can be no question. In time the Church gained much 
from the mixture of these new peoples among the old, as they 
infused new vigor and energy into the blood of the old races, but 

1 A Germanic king, when he feared no Roman general or emperor, could usually 
be made to stand in awe when a Christian priest or bishop appealed to Heaven and 
the saints, and threatened him with eternal hell-fire if he did not do his bidding. 

^ The Church, it must be remembered, maintained its separate system of govern- 
ment and kept up the old forms of the Roman law. It had also its courts and its 
exemptions for the clergy, and these it forced the barbarians to respect. During 
half a dozen centuries it was the chief force that made life tolerable for myriads of 
men and women, and almost the only force upholding any semblance of humane ideals. 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE 



119 



the immediate effect was quite otherwise. The Church itself was 
paganized, but the barbarians were in time Christianized. 

Priests and missionaries went among the heathen tribes and 
labored for their conversion. Of course the leaders were sought 
out first, and often the conversion of a chieftain was made by 
first converting his wife. After the chieftain had been won the 
minor leaders in time followed. The lesson of the cross was pro- 
claimed, and the softening and restraining influences of the Chris- 
tian faith were exerted on the 

barbarian. It was, however, a 
long and weary road to re- 
store even a semblance of the 
order and respect for life and 
property which had prevailed 
under Roman rule. 

One of the most interesting 
of all the conversions was that 
made by the Bishop Ulphilas 
(c. 313-383) among the Visi- 
goths, before they moved 
westward from their original 
home north of the Danube, 
in what is now southwestern 
Russia. Ulphilas was made 
bishop and sent among them 
in 343, and spent the re- 
mainder of his life in laboring 
with them. He devised an 
alphabet for them, based on 
the Greek, and gave them a 
written language into which 
he translated for them the 
Bible, or rather large por- 
tions of it. In the translation 
he omitted the two books of 
Kings and the two Samuels, 
that the people might not find in them a further stimulus to their 
great warlike activity. 

Christianity had been carried early to Great Britain by Roman 
missionaries, and in 440 Saint Patrick converted the Irish. In 
563 Saint Columba crossed to Scotland, founded the monastery 



IMIlKlSSTIlKA(i(^^lhAiri)i;^K(l.^(35:ftlhKR 



•u"l2ta(SJ^^'DI^Ki\lh^(§J\ll£sOK!nIO^ 




Fig. 36. A Page of the Gothic 

Gospels (reduced) 

One of the treasures of the library of the 
University of Upsala, in Sweden, is a man- 
uscript of this translation by Bishop Ulphilas. 
Greek letters, with a few Runic signs were 
used to represent Gothic sounds. The word 
"rune" comes from a Gothic word meaning 
"mystery." To the primitive Germans it 
seemed a mysterious thing that a series of 
marks could express thought. 



120 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

at lona, and began the conversion of the Scots. After the Angles 
and Saxons and Jutes had overrun eastern and southern Britain 
there was a period of several generations during which this por- 
tion of the island was given over to Teutonic heathenism. In 597 
Saint Augustine, "the Apostle to the English," landed in Kent 
and began the conversion of the people, that year succeeding in 
converting Ethelbert, King of Kent. In 626 Edwin, King of 
Northumbria, was converted, and in 635 the English of Wessex 
accepted Christianity. The English at once became strong sup- 
porters of the Christian faith, and in 878 they forced the invading 
Danes to accept Christianity as one of the conditions of the Peace 
of Wedmore. (See Map, Figure 42.) 

In 496 Clovis, King of the Franks, and three thousand of his 
followers were baptized, following a vow and a victory in battle; ^ 
in 587 Recarred, King of the Goths in Spain, was won over; and 
in 681 the South Saxons accepted Christianity. The Germans 
of Bavaria and Thuringia were finally won over by about 740. 
Charlemagne repeatedly forced the northern Saxons to accept 
Christianity, between 772 and 804, when the final submission of 
this German tribe took place. Finally, in the tenth century, Rollo, 
Duke of the Normans, was won (912); Boleslav II, King of the 
Bohemians, in 967; and the Hungarians in 972. In the tenth 
century the Slavs were converted to the Eastern or Greek type 
of Christianity, and Poland, Norway, and Sweden to the Western 
or Roman type. The last people to be converted were the Prus- 
sians, a half-Slavic tribe inhabiting East Prussia and Lithuania, 
along the eastern Baltic, who were not brought to accept Chris- 
tianity, in name, until near the middle of the thirteenth century, 
though efforts were begun with them as early as 900. As late 
as 1230 they were offering human sacrifices to their heathen 
gods to secure their favor, but soon after this date they were 
forced to a nominal acceptance of Christianity as a result of 
conquest by the "Teutonic Knights." It was thus a thousand 
years after its foundation before Europe had accepted in name 
the Christian faith. To change a nominal acceptance to some 
semblance of a reality has been the work of the succeeding centu- 
ries. 

^ Clotilda, wife of the heathen Clovis, was a Burgundian princess and a devout 
Christian, who had long tried to persuade her husband to accept her faith. In 496, 
during a battle with the Alemanni, near the present city of Strassburg, Clovis vowed 
that if the God of Clotilda would give him victory, he would do as she desired. The 
Alemanni were crushed, and he and three thousand of his chiefs were at once 
baptized. 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE I2I 

Work of the Church during the Middle Ages. Everywhere 
throughout the old Empire, and far into the forest depths of 
barbarian lands, went bishops, priests, and missionaries, and 
there parishes were organized, rude churches arose, and the 
process of educating the fighting tribesmen in the ways of civil- 
ized life was carried out. It was not by schools of learning, but 
by faith and ceremonial that the Church educated and guided her 
children into the type she approved. Schools for other than 
monks and clergy for a time were not needed, and such practically 
died out. The Church and its offices took' the place of education 
and exercised a wholesome and restraining influence over both 
young and old throughout the long period of the Middle Ages. 
These the Church in time taught the barbarian to respect. The 
great educational work of the Church during this period of in- 
security and ignorance has seldom been better stated than in 
the following words by Draper: 

Of the great ecclesiastics, many had risen from the humblest ranks 
of society, and these men, true to their democratic instincts, were often 
found to be the inflexible suj^porters of right against might. Eventu- 
ally coming to be the depositaries of the knowledge that then existed, 
they opposed intellect to brute force, in many instances successfully, 
and by the example of the organization of the Church, which was 
essentially republican, they showed how representative systems may 
be introduced into the State. Nor was it over communities and nations 
that the Church displayed her chief power. Never in the world before 
was there such a system. From her central seat at Rome, her all- 
seeing eye, hke that of Providence itself, could equally take in a hemi- 
sphere at a glance, or examine the private life of any individual. Her 
boundless influences enveloped kings in their palaces, and relieved the 
beggar at the monastery gate. In all Europe there was not a man too 
obscure, too insignificant, or too desolate for her. Surrounded by her 
solemnities, every one received his name at her altar; her bells chimed 
at his marriage, her knell tolled at his funeral. She extorted from him 
the secrets of liis life at her confessionals, and punished his faults by 
her penances. In his hour of sickness and trouble her servants sought 
him out, teaching him, by her exquisite litanies and prayers, to place 
his reliance on God, or strengthening him for the trials of Hfe by the 
example of the holy and just. Her prayers had an efficacy to give 
repose to the souls of his dead. When, even to his friends, his lifeless 
body had become an offense, in the name of God she received it into 
her consecrated ground, and under her shadow he rested till the great 
reckoning-day. From little better than a slave she raised his wife to 
be his equal, and, forbidding him to have more than one, met her recom- 
pense for those noble deeds in a firm friend at every fireside. Dis- 
countenancing all impure love, she put round that fireside the children 



122 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

of one mother, and made that mother little less than sacred in their 
eyes. In ages of lawlessness and rapine, among people but a step above 
savages, she vindicated the inviolability of her precincts against the 
hand of power, and made her temples a refuge and sanctuary for the 
despairing and oppressed. Truly she was the shadow of a great rock 
in many a weary land.^ 

The civilizing work of the monasteries. No less important 
than the Church and its clergy was the work of the monasteries 
and their monks in building up a basis for a new civilization. 
These, too, were founded all over Europe. To make a map of 
western Europe showing the monasteries established by 800 a.d. 
would be to cover the map with a series of dots.^ The importance 
of their work is better understood when we remember that the 
Germans had never lived in cities, and did not settle in them on 
entering the Empire. The monasteries, too, were seldom estab- 
lished in towns. Their sites were in the river valleys and in the 
forests (R. 69), and the monks became the pioneers in clearing 
the land and preparing the way for agriculture and civilization. 
Not infrequently a swamp was taken and drained. The Middle- 
Age period was essentially a period of settlement of the land and 
of agricultural development, and the monks lived on the land 
and among a people just passing through the earliest stages of 
settled and civilized life. In a way the inheritors of the agricul- 
tural and handicraft knowledge of the Romans, the monks be- 
came the most skillful artisans and farmers to be found, and from 
them these arts in time reached the developing peasantry around 
them. Their work and services have been well summed up by 
the same author just quoted, as follows: 

It was mainly by the monasteries that to the peasant class of Europe 
was pointed out the way of civilization. The devotions and charities; 
the austerities of the brethren; their abstemious meal; their meager 
clothing, the cheapest of the country in which they lived ; their shaven 
heads, or the cowl which shut out the sight of sinful objects; the long 
staff in their hands; their naked feet and legs; their passing forth on 
their journeys by twos, each a watch on his brother; the prohibitions 

' Draper, John W., Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. 11, pp. 145-46. 

* The extent of the Benedictine order alone may be seen from the Benedictine 
statement that "Pope John XXII, who died in 1334, after an exact inquiry, found 
that, since the first rise of the order, there had been of it 24 popes, near 200 cardinals, 
7000 archbishops, 15,000 bishops, 15,000 abbots of renown, above 4000 saints, and 
upwards of 37,000 monasteries. There had been likewise, of this order, 20 emperors, 
10 empresses, 47 kings and above 50 queens, 20 sons of emperors and 48 sons of 
kings, about 100 princesses and daughters of kings and emperors, besides dukes, 
marquises, earls, countesses, etc., innumerable." From this it may be inferred how 
fully the Church was the State during the long period of the Middle Ages. 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE 123 

against eating outside of the wall of the monastery, which had its own 
mill, its own bakehouse, and whatever was needed in an abstemious 
domestic economy (Figure 38) ; their silent hospitality to the wayfarer, 
who was refreshed in a separate apartment; the lands around their 
buildings turned from a wilderness into a garden, and, above all, labor 
exalted and ennobled by their holy hands, and celibacy, forever, in the 
eye of the vulgar, a proof of separation from the world and a sacrifice 
to heaven — these were the things that arrested the attention of the 
barbarians of Europe, and led them on to civilization. ^ 

The problem faced by the Middle Ages. That the lamp of 
learning burned low during this period of assimilation is no cause 
for wonder. Recovery from such a deluge of barbarism on a 
weakened society is not easy. In fact the recovery was a long 
and slow process, occupying nearly the whole of a thousand years. 
The problem which faced the Church, as the sole surviving force 
capable of exerting any constructive influence, was that of chang- 
ing the barbarism and anarchy of the sLxth century, with its low 
standards of living and lack of humane ideals, into the intelligent, 
progressive civilization of the fifteenth century. This was the 
work of the Middle Ages, and largely the work of the Christian 
Church. It was not a period of progress, but one of assimilation, 
so that a common western civilization might in time be developed 
out of the diverse and hostile elements mixed together by the rude 
force of circumstances. The enfeebled Roman race was to be 
reinvigorated by mixture with the youthful and vigorous Germans 
(R. 50); to the institutions of ancient society were to be added 
certain social and political institutions of the Germanic peoples; 
all were to be brought under the rule of a common Christian 
Church; and finally, when these people had become sufficiently 
civilized and educated to enable them to understand and appre- 
ciate, "nearly every achievement of the Greeks and the Romans 
in thought, science, law, and the practical arts" was to be recov- 
ered and made a part of our western civilization. 

In this chapter we have dealt largely with the great fundamen- 
tal movements which have so deeply influenced the course of 
human history. In the chapters which immediately follow we 
shall tell how learning was preserved during the period and what 
facilities for education actually existed; trace the more important 
efforts made to reestablish schools and learning; and finally 
describe the culmination of the process of absorbing and educating 

' Draper, John W., Intfllc:tiicl Devdopmcnl of Europe, vol. i, p. 437. 



124 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the Germans in the civilization they had conquered that came in 
the great period of recovery of the ancient learning and civiliza- 
tion — the age of the Renaissance. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Do the peculiar problems of assimilation of the foreign-born, revealed to 
us by the World War, put us in a somewhat similar position to Rome 
under the Empire as relates to the need of a guiding national faith? 

2. Outline how Rome might have been helped and strengthened by a 
national school system under state control. 

3. Outline how our state school systems could be made much more effective 
as national instruments by the infusion into their instruction of a strong 
national faith. 

4. Try to picture the results upon our civiHzation had western Europe 
become Mohammedan. 

5. The movement of new peoples into the Roman Empire was much slower 
than has been the immigration of foreign peoples into the United States, 
since 1840. Why the difference in assimilative power? 

6. How do you think the Roman provinces and Italy, after the tribes from 
the North had settled down within the Empire, compared with Mexico 
after the years of revolution with peons and brigands in control? With 
Russia, after the destruction wrought by the Bolshevists? 

7. Explain the importance of the long civilizing and educating work of 
Rome among the German tribes, in preparing the means for the preserva- 
tion of Roman institutions after the downfall of the Roman govern- 
ment. 

8. What does the fact that Roman institutions and Roman thinking con- 
tinued and profoundly modified mediaeval Hfe indicate as to the nature 
of Roman government and the Roman power of assimilation? 

9. Though Rome never instituted a state school system, was there not 
after all large educational work done by the government through its 
intelligent administration? 

10. Show how the breakdown of Roman government and Roman institutions 
was naturally more complete in Gaul than in northern Italy, and more 
complete in northern than in central or southern Italy, and hence how 
Roman civilization was naturally preserved in larger measure in the 
cities of Italy than elsewhere. 

11. Show how the Christian Church, too, could not have completely dis- 
pensed with Roman letters and Roman civilization, had it desired to do 
so, but was forced of necessity to preserve and pass on important portions 
of the civilization of Rome. 

12. What do you think would have been the effect on the future of civiliza- 
tion had the barbarian tribes overrun Spain, Italy, and Greece during 
the Age of Pericles? 

13. What modern analogies do we have to the civilizing work of the monks 
and clergy during the Middle Ages? 

14. Picture the work of the monasteries in handing on to western Europe 
the arts and handicrafts and skilled occupations of Rome. Cite some 
examples. 

15. What civilizing problem, somewhat comparable to that of barbarian 
Europe, have we faced in our national history? Why have we been 
able to obtain results so much more rapidly? 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE EMPIRE 125 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced : 

46. Caesar: The Hunting Germans and their Fighting Ways. 

47. Tacitus: The Germans and their Domestic Habits. 

48. Dill: Effect on the Roman World of the News of the Sacking of Rome 
by Alaric. 

49. Giry and Reville: Fate of the Old Roman Towns. 

50. Kingsley: The Invaders, and what they brought. 

51. General Form for a Grant of Immunity to a Bishop. 

52. Charlemagne: Powers and Immunities granted to the Monastery of 
Saint Marcellus. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

J . State the differences in character Caesar observes (46) between the 
Gauls to the west of the Rhine and the Germans to the east. 

2. What German characteristics that Tacitus describes (47) would prove 
good additions to Roman life? 

3. Do the emotions of Saint Jerome on hearing of the sacking of Rome (48) 
reveal anything as to the extent to which the Roman had become a 
Churchman and the Churchman a Roman? Illustrate. 

4. Is it probable that a quarter-century of Bolsheviki rule in Russia would 
produce results comparable to those described by Giry and Reville (49)? 

5. Is Kingsley right in stating (50) that the best elements of all the modecn 
European peoples came from the barbarian invaders? State what seem 
to you to be the important contributions of barbarian invader, Roman, 
and Churchman. 

6. Do the grants of privileges and immunities shown in the general form (51) 
and the specific form (52) seem to follow naturally from the earlier 
grants to physicians and teachers (26) and to the clergy (38)? Point 
out the relationship. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. 
Church, R. W. The Beginni)igs of the Middle Ages. 
Kingsley, Chas. The Roman and Teuton. 

* Thorndike, Lynn. History of Mediaeval Europe. 



CHAPTER VI 

EDUCATION DURING THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES ' 

I. CONDITION AND PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 

The low intellectual level. As was stated in the preceding 
chapter, the lamp of learning burned low throughout the most of 
western Europe during the period of assimilation and partial 
civilization of the barbarian tribes. The western portion of the 
Roman Empire had been overrun, and rude Germanic chieftains 
were establishing, by the law of might, new kingdoms on the 
ruins of the old. The Germanic tribes had no intellectual hfe of 
their own to contribute, and no intellectual tastes to be ministered 
unto. With the destruction of cities and towns and country 
villas, with their artistic and hterary collections, much that repre- 
sented the old culture was obHterated," and books became more 
and more scarce.^ The destruction was gradual, but by the be- 
ginning of the seventh century the loss had become great. The 
Roman schools also gradually died out as the need for an educa- 
tion which prepared for government and gave a knowledge of 
Roman law passed away, and the type of education approved by 
the Church was left in complete control of the field. As the 
security and leisure needed for study disappeared, and as the only 
use for learning was now in the service of the Church, education 
became limited to the narrow lines which offered such preparation 
and to the few who needed it. Amid the ruins of the ancient civili- 
zation the Church stood as the only conservative and regenera- 
tive force, and naturally what learning remained passed into its 
hands and under its control. 

The result of all these influences and happenings was that by 

1 From the sixth to the twelfth centuries. 

2 The story which has come down to us of the German warrior who, on being 
shown into an anteroom, saw some ducks swimming in the floor and dashed his 
battle-axe at them to see if they were real, thus ruining the beautiful mosaic, is 
typical of the time. 

' During the period of Rome's greatness the publishing business became an 
important one. Manuscripts were copied in numbers by trained writers, and books 
were officially pubUshed. Both public and private libraries became common, men 
of wealth often having large libraries. These were found in the provincial towns as 
well as in the large Italian cities, and in country villas as well as in town houses. 

By the beginning of the eighth century books had become so scarce that monas- 
teries guarded their treasures with great care CR. 65), and books were borrowed from 
k)ng distances that copies might be made. 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 127 

the beginning of the seventh century Christian Europe had 
reached a very low intellectual level, and during the seventh and 
eighth centuries conditions grew worse instead of better. Only 
in England and Ireland, as will be pointed out a little later, and 
in a few Italian cities, was there anything of consequence of the 
old Roman learning preserved. On the Continent there was little 
general learning, even among the clergy (R. 64 a). Many of the 
priests were woefully ignorant,^ and the Latin writings of the time 
contain many inaccuracies and corruptions which reveal the low 
standard of learning even among the better educated of the 
clerical class. The Church itself was seriously affected by the 
prevailing ignorance of the period, and incorporated into its sys 
tem of government and worship many barbarous customs and 
practices of which it was a long time in ridding itself. So great 
had become the ignorance and superstition of the time, among 
priests, monks, and the people; so much had religion taken on 
the worship of saints and relics and shrines; and so much had 
the Church developed the sensuous and symbolic, that religion 
had in reality become a crude polytheism instead of the simple 
monotheistic faith of the early Church. Along scientific lines 
especially the loss was very great. Scientific ideas as to natu- 
ral phenomena disappeared, and crude and childish ideas as to 
natural forces came to prevail. As if barbarian chiefs and rob- 
ber bands were not enough, popular imagination peopled the 
world with demons, goblins, and dragons, and all sorts of super- 
stitions and supernatural happenings were recorded. Intercom- 
munication largely ceased; trade and commerce died out; the 
accumulated wealth of the past was destroyed; and the old 
knowledge of the known world became badly distorted, as is 
evidenced by the many crude mediaeval maps. (See Figure 46.) 
The only scholarship of the time, if such it might be called, was_ 
the little needed by the Church to provide for and maintain its 
government and worship. Almost ever>^thing that we to-day 
mean by civilization in that age was found within the protecting 
walls of monastery or church, and these institutions were at first 
too busy building up the foundations upon which a future culture 
might rest to spend much time in preserving learning, much less 
in advancing it. 

1 Charlemagne (King of Frankland, 768-814), for example, found it necessary to 
order that priests and monks must show themselves capable of changing the wording 
of the masses for the living and the dead, as circumstances required, from singular 
lo plural, or from masculine to feminine. 



128 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The monasteries develop schools. In this age of perpetual law- 
lessness and disorder the one opportunity for a life of repose and 
scholarly contemplation lay in the monasteries. Here the rule 
of might and force was absent (R. 52), and the timid, the devout, 




Fig. 37. a Typical Monastery of Southern Europe 

and the studiously inclined here found a refuge from the turbu 
lence and brutality of a rude civilization. The early monasteries^ 
and especially the monastery of Saint Victor, at Marseilles, 
founded by Cassian in 404, had represented a culmination of the* 
western feeling of antagonism to all ancient learning, but with the 
founding of Monte Cassino by Saint Benedict, in 529 a.d., and 
the promulgation of the Benedictine rule (R. 43), a more liberal 
attitude was shown. ^ This rule was adopted generally by the 
monasteries throughout what is now Italy, Spain, France, Ger- 
many, and England, and the Benedictine became the type for the 
monks of the early Middle Ages. To this order we are largely 
indebted for the copying of books and the preservation of learning 
throughout the mediaeval period. 

The 48th rule of Saint Benedict, it will be remembered (R. 43), 
had imposed reading and study as a part of the daily duty of 
every monk, but had said nothing about schools. Subsequent 
regulations issued by superiors had aimed at the better enforce- 
ment of this rule (R. 44) , that the monks might lead devout lives 
and know the Bible and the sacred writings of the Church. Im- 
posed at first as a matter of education and discipline for the monks, 
this rule ultimately led to the establishment of schools and the 

' Longfellow's poem Monte Cassino is interesting reading here. Of Benedict he 
says: 

"He founded here his Convent and his Rule 

Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer; 
The pen became a clarion, and his school 
Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air." 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 129 

development of a system of monastic instruction. As youths 
were received at an early age ^ into the monasteries to prepare for 
a monastic life, it was necessary that they be taught to read if 
they were later to use the sacred books. This led to the duty of 
instructing novices, which marks the beginning of monastic in- 
struction for those within the walls. As books were scarce and at 
the same time necessary, and the only way to get new ones was to 
copy from old ones, the monasteries were soon led to take up the 
work once carried on by the publishing houses of ancient Rome, 
and in much the same way. This made writing necessary, and 
the novices had to be instructed carefully in this, as well as in 
reading.- The chants and music of the Church called for in- 
struction of the novices in music, and the celebration of Easter 
and the fast and festival days of the Church called for some rudi- 
mentary instruction in numbers and calculation. 

Out of these needs rose the monastery school, the copying of 
manuscripts, and the preservation of books. Due to their 
greater security and quiet the monasteries became the leading 
teaching institutions of the early part of the Middle-Age period, 
and those who wished their children trained for the service of the 
Churgh gave them to the monasteries (R. 53 a). The develop- 
ment of the monastic schools was largely voluntary, though from 
an early date bishops and rulers began urging the monasteries to 
open schools for boys in connection with their houses, and schools 
became in time a regular feature of the monastic organization. 
From schools only for those intending to take the vows (oblati), 
the instruction was gradually opened, after the ninth century, 
to others (externi) not intending to take the vows, and what came 
to be known as "outer" monastic schools were in time developed. 

The monasteries became the preservers of learning. Another 
need developed the copying of pagan books, and incidentally the 
preservation of some of the best of Roman literature. The lan- 
guage of the Church very naturally was Latin, as it was a direct 
descendant of Roman Hfe, governmental organization, citizenship, 
and education. The writings of the Fathers of the Western 
Church had all been in Latin, and in the fourth century the Bible 

^ Sometimes as early as eleven to twelve years of age. The novitiate course was 
two years, but as the vows could not be taken before eighteen, the course of instruc- 
tion often covered six to eight years. 

^ To teach a novice to copy accurately a manuscript book was quite a different 
thing from the teaching of writing to-day, It was more nearly comparable to 
present-day instruction in lettering in a college engineering course, as it called for a 
degree of workmanship and accuracy not required in ordinary writing. 



cuiro> 



^a^'^^- £S^i^-- ^S::,^&^i=^i?. 



■-^_ r,./ 











^;S^«^^^^ 



Fig. 38. Bird's-Eye View of a Mediaeval Monastery 

(From an engraving by Viollet-le-Duc, dated 1718, of the Cistercian Abbey of 

Citeaux, in France) 
This monastery was founded in the forests of what is now northeastern France, 
in 1198 A.D., and was the first of a reformed Benedictine order, known as Cister- 
cians- For an explanation of the monastery, see the opposite page. 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 131 

had been translated from the Greek into the Latin. This edition, 
known as the Vulgate ^ Bible, became the standard for western 
Europe for ten centuries to come. The German tribes which 
had invaded the Empire had no written languages of their own, 
and their spoken dialects differed much from the Latin speech of 
those whom they had conquered. Latin was thus the language 
of all those of education, and naturally continued as the language 
of the Church and the monastery for both speech and writing. 
All books were, of course, written in Latin. 

Under the rude influences and the general ignorance of the 
period, though, the language was easily and rapidly corrupted, 
and it became necessary for the monasteries and the churches to 
have good models of Latin prose and verse to refer to. These 
were best found in the old Latin literary authors — particularly 
Caesar, Cicero, and Vergil. To have these, due to the great 
destruction of old books which had taken place during the inter- 
vening centuries, it was necessary to copy these authors,- as well 
as the Psalter, the Missal,^ the sacred books, and the writings of 

' The Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible made by Saint Jerome, at the 
close of the fourth century. The Old Testament he translated mostly from the 
Hebrew and Chaldaic, and the New Testament he revised from the older Latin ver- 
sions. This is the only version of the Scriptures which the Roman Catholic Church 
admits as authentic. 

^ Letters from one monastery to another, and from one coimtry to another, beg- 
ging the loan of some ancient book, have been preserved in numbers. Lupus, 
Abbot of Ferrieres in France, for example, wrote to Rome in 855, and addressing 
himself to the Pope in person, requested a complete copy of Cicero's De Oratorc, 
which he desired. 

' The Missal is a book containing the ser\'ice of the mass for the entire year. The 
Psalter the book of Psalms. 

Explanation of the Monastery opposite : The cross, by the roadside, indicates 
the entrance gate. Passing through the orchards and fields, the traveler reached 
the outer gate-house. At the almonry (C) food and drink were given out; on 
the second floor rooms for the night could be had; in the little chapel (Z)) prayers 
could be said ; and in the stable (F) the traveler's horse could be cared for for the 
night. An inner gate through (E) opened into an inner court, around which 
were the bams, chicken-yards, cow-sheds, etc. The Abbot lived at H. G was a 
dormitory for the lay brothers who did the heavy work of the monastery, and who 
entered the church (iV) at the rear through a special doorway (5). All of these 
buildings were considered as outside the monastery proper. 

Inside were the great church (N), with the library (P) in the rear. Seven scriptoria 
are shown on the side of the library building. M was the large dormitory for 
the monks, and R the infirmary for old and sick brothers. I was the kitchen, K was 
the dining-hall (refectory), and L the stairs to the upper dormitory rooms. C and 
E are two cloisters with corridors on the four sides, somewhat similar to the cloisters 
shown for the monastery on Plate i. The copying of books often took place in 
these cloisters, though a scriptorium was usually found under the library, the 
library proper, as in Plate 2, being on the second floor (P) and reached by a winding 
stair. A wall surrounded the monastery grounds, and a stream of running water 
passed through them. 



132 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the Fathers of the Church (Rs. 55, 56). It thus happened that 
the monasteries unintentionally began to preserve and use the 
ancient Roman books, and from using them at first as models for 
style, an interest in their contents was later awakened. While 
many of the monasteries remained as farming, charitable, and 
ascetic institutions almost exclusively, and were never noted for 
their educational work, a small but increasing number gradually 
accumulated libraries and became celebrated for their literary 
activity and for the character of their instruction. The monas- 
teries thus in time became the storehouses of learning, the pub- 
Ushing houses of the Middle Ages (Rs. 54, 55, 56), teaching 
institutions of first importance, and centers of literary activity 
and religious thought, as well as centers for agricultural develop- 
ment, work in the arts and crafts, and Christian hospitality. 
Many developed into large and important institutions (R. 69). 

The copying of manuscripts.^ The work of the more important 
monasteries and the monastic churches in copying books was a 
service to learning of large future significance. While many of 
the books copied were for the promotion of the religious service, 
such as Missals and Psalters (R. 55), and many others were tales 
of saints and wearisome comments on the sacred writings, a 
few were old classical texts representing the best of Roman liter- 
ary work. A few monastic chronicles and histories of importance 
were composed by the brothers, and also preserved for us by the 
copying process. 

The production of a single book was a task of large proportions, 
and explains in part the small number of volumes the monasteries 
accumulated. After the raids of the Mohammedans across 
Egypt, in the seventh century, the supply of Egyptian papyrus 
stopped because of the interruption of communications, and the 
only writing material during the Middle Ages was the skin of 
sheep or goats or calves. Sheepskins were chiefly used, and a 
book of size might require a hundred or more skins. These 
were first soaked in Hmewater to loosen the hair, then scraped 
clean of hair and flesh, and then carefully stretched on board 
frames to dry. After they had dried they were again scraped 
with sharp knives to secure an even thickness, and then rubbed 
smooth with pumice and chalk. When finished, the clean, shin- 
ing, cream-colored skin was known as vellum,^ or parchment. 

^ From matiu scriptum, meaning written by hand. 

* So expensive of time and effort was the production of books by this method 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 



133 




This was next cut into pages of the desired size and arranged 
ready for writing. The larger pieces were used for large books, 
such as are shown in Plate 2, and the remnants to produce small 
books. The inks, too, had to be prepared, and the pages ruled. 

The main writing was done with black, but the page was fre- 
quently bordered with red, gold, or some other bright color, 
while many beautiful illustrations 
were inserted by artistic monks. 
Sometimes an initial letter was 
beautifully embellished, as is 
shown in Figure 39; sometimes 
illustrations were introduced in 
the body of the page, of which 
Figures 39 and 40 are types; and 
sometimes a colored illustration 
was painted on a sheet of vellum 
and inserted in the book. Figure 
44 represents such an illustrated 
page in an old manuscript. Fi- 
nally, when completed, the let- 
tered and illustrated parchment 
sheets were arranged in order, 
sewed together with a deerskin 
or pigskin string, bound together 
between oaken boards and covered 
with pigskin, properly lettered in gold, fitted with metal comers 
and clasps (R. 57), as shown in Plate 2, and often chained to 
their bookrack in the library with heavy iron chains as well. 
(See Figure 71 and Plate 2.) Still further to protect the volume 
from theft, an anathema against the thief was usually lettered 
in the volume (R. 58). 

Such was the painfully slow method of producing and multi- 
plying books before the advent of printing, and in days when 
skill in copying manuscripts was not particularly common, even 
among the monks. It required from a few months to a year or 
more to produce a few copies, depending on the size and nature 
of the work, whereas to-day, with printing-presses, five thousand 

that majiy of the manuscripts now extant were written crosswise on sheets from 
which the previous writing had been largely erased by chemical or mechanical 
means. How many valuable ancient manuscripts were lost in this manner no one 
knows. Fortunately the practice was not common until after the thirteenth cen- 
tury, when the rise of the universities and the spread of learning made new demands 
(or skins for writing purposes. 



Fig. 39. Initial Letter from 
AN Old Manuscript 

This shows the beautiful work done 
by some of the nuns and monks in 
"illuminating" the books they copied. 
This was done in colors by a nun, 
who pictured her own work in this 
initial letter L. 



134 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



copies of such a book as this can be printed and bound in a few 
days. 

The scriptorium. An important part of the material equip- 
ment of many monasteries, in consequence, came to be a scripto- 
rium, or writing- room, where the copying of manuscripts could 
take place undisturbed. In some monasteries one general room 
was provided, though it was customary to have a number of 
small rooms at the side of the library. In the monastery shown in 
Figure 38, seven small rooms for this purpose are shown built out 

on one side of the library. 
Sometimes individual cells 
along a corridor were provided. 
The advantage of the single 
room in which a number of 
monks worked came when an 
edition of eight or ten copies 
of a book was to be prepared. 
One monk could then dictate, 
while eight or ten others care- 
fully printed on the skins be- 
fore them what was dictated 
by the reader.^ Figure 40 
shows a monk at work, though 
here he is copying from a book 
before him. After an edition 
of eight or ten copies of a book 
had been prepared and bound 
the extra copies were sent tc 
neighboring and sometimes 
distant monasteries, sometimes in exchange for other books, and 
sometimes as gifts to brothers who had longed to read the work 

^ That the printing was not always carefully done is shown by the constant need, 
throughout the Middle Ages, of correct copies for comparison. The following 
injunction of the Abbot Alcuin to the monks at Tours, given at the beginning of the 
ninth century, is illustrative of the need for care in copying: 

"Her^ let the scribes sit who copy out the words of the Divine Law, and likewise 
the hallowed sayings of Holy Fathers. Let them beware of interspersing their own 
frivolities in the words they copy, nor let a trifler's hand make mistakes through 
haste. Let them earnestly seek out for themselves correctly written books to tran- 
scribe, that the fljnng pen may speed along the right path. Let them distinguish 
the proper sense by colons and commas, and set the points, each one in its due place, 
and let not him who reads the words to them either read falsely or pause suddenly. 
It is a noble work to write out holy books, nor shall the scribe fail of his due reward. 
Writing books is better than planting vines, for he who plants a vine serves liis belly, 
but he who wri^^^e? a book serves his soul." 




Fig. 40. A Monk in a Scriptorium 

(From an illuminated picture in a manu- 
script in the Royal Library at Brussels) 
This picture shows the beautiful work done 
in "illuminating" manuscript books by 
mediaeval writers. Each copy was a work 
of art. This represents a better type of 
scriptorium than is usually shown. 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 135 

(R. 55). New monasteries were provided with the beginnings of 
a library in this way, and churches were suppHed with Missals, 
Psalters, and other books needed for their services. 

The writing-room, or rooms, came to be a very important 
place in those monasteries noted for their literary activity. West 
gives an interesting description of the scriptorium at Tours, where 
the learned EngHsh monk, Alcuin, was Abbot from 796 to 804, 
and which at the time was the principal book-writing monastery 
in Frankland, Describing Alcuin's labors to secure books to 
send to other monasteries in Charlemagne's kingdom, he says: 

We can almost reconstruct the scene. In the intervals between the 
hours of prayer and the observance of the round of cloister life, come 
hours for the copying of books under the presiding genius of Alcuin. 
The young monks file into the scriptorium, and one of them is given 
the precious parchment volume containing a work of Bede or Isidore 
or Augustine, or else some portion of the Latin Scriptures, or even a 
heathen author. He reads slowly and clearly at a measured rate while 
all the others seated at their desks take down his words, and thus per- 
haps a score of copies are made at once. Alcuin's observant eye watches 
each in turn, and his correcting hand points out the mistakes in ortho- 
graphy and punctuation. The master of Charles the Great, in that 
true humility that is the charm of his whole behavior, makes himself 
the writing-master of his monks, stooping to the drudgery of faithfully 
and gently correcting their many puerile mistakes, and all for the love 
of studies and the love of Christ. Under such guidance, and deeply 
impressed by the fact that in the copying of a few books they were 
saving learning and knowledge from perishing, and thereby offering a 
service most acceptable to God, the copying in the scriptorium went on 
in sobriety from day to day. Thus were produced those improved 
copies of books which mark the beginning of a new age in the conserving 
and transmission of learning. Alcuin's anxiety in this regard was not 
undue, for the few monasteries where books could be accurately tran- 
scribed were as necessary for publication in that time as are the great 
publishing houses to-day.^ 

Monastic collections. Despite the important work done by a 
few of the monasteries in preserving and advancing learning, large 
collections of books were unknown before the Revival of Learning, 
in the fourteenth century. The process of book production in 
itself was very slow, and many of the volumes produced were 
later lost through fire, or pillage by new invaders. During the 
early days of wood construction a number of monastic and church 
libraries were burned by accident. In the pillaging of the Danes 
and Northmen on the coasts of England and northern France, 

' West, A. F., Alcuin, pp. 72-73. 



136 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



\ NORTH ^^7=1 
^^Iptia *^^ Lindisfarne 

\-v^ A ^ Wearroouth and Yarrow 

tNAVhitby SEA 
York \ 



" ; Oxford 





Fig. 41. Charlemagne's Empire, and the Important Monasteries 

OF the Time 
Charlemagne's empire at his death is shaded darker than other parts of the map 

in the ninth and tenth centuries, a number of important monastic 
collections there were lost. In Italy the Lombards destroyed 
some collections in their sixth-century invasion, and the Saracens 
burned some in southern Italy in the ninth. Monte Cassino, 
among other monasteries, was destroyed by both the Lombards 
and the Saracens. From a number of extant catalogues of old 
monastic libraries we know that, even as late as the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries, a library of from two to three hundred 
volumes was large. ^ The catalogues show that most of these 

^ The largest monastic library on the Continent was Fulda, which specialized in 
the copying of manuscripts. In 1561 it had 774 volumes. In England the largest 
collections were at Canterbury, which in the fourteenth century possessed 698 vol- 
umes, and at Peterborough, which had 344 volumes at about the same time. The 
library of Croyland, also in England, burned in 1091, at that time contained approx- 
imately 700 volumes. These represented the largest collections in Europe. 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 137 

were books of a religious nature, being monastic chronicles, man- 
uals of devotion, comments on the Scriptures, lives of miracle- 
working saints, and books of a similar nature (Rs. 55, 56). A few 
were commentaries on the ancient learning, or mediaeval text- 
books on the great subjects of study of the time (R. 60). A still 
smaller number were copies of old classical literary works, and of 
the utmost value (R. 57) . 

The convents and their schools. The early part of the Middle 
Ages also witnessed a remarkable development of convents for 
women, these receiving a special development in Germanic lands. 
Filled with the same aggressive spirit as the men, but softened 
somewhat by Christianity, many women of high station among 
the German tribes founded convents and developed institutions 
of much renown. This provided a rather superior class of women 
as organizers and directors, and a conventual life continued, 
throughout the entire Middle Ages, to attract an excellent class 
of women. This will be understood when it is remembered that 
a conventual life offered to women of intellectual ability and schol- 
arly tastes the one opportunity for an education and a life of 
learning. The convents, too, were much earlier and much more 
extensively opened for instruction to those not intending to take 
the vows than was the case with the monasteries, and, in conse- 
quence, it became a common practice throughout the Middle 
Ages, just as it is to-day among Catholic famihes, to send girls to 
the convent for education and for training in manners and religion. 
Many well-trained women were produced in the convents of 
Europe in the period from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries. 

The instruction consisted of reading, writing, and copying 
Latin, as in the monasteries, as well as music, weaving and spin- 
ning, and needlework. Weaving and spinning had an obvious 
utilitarian purpose, and needlework, in addition to necessary 
sewing, was especially useful in the production of altar-cloths and 
sacred vestments. The copying and illuminating of manuscripts, 
music, and embroidering made a special appeal to women (R. 56), 
and some of the most beautifully copied and illuminated manu- 
scripts of the mediaeval period are products of their skill. ^ Their 
contribution to music and art, as it influenced the life of the time, 

' The Horlus Delkarum of the Abbess Herrard, of the convent of Hohenburg, in 
Alsace, was a famous illustration of artistic workmanship. This was an attempt to 
embody, in encyclopaedic form, the knowledge of her time. The manuscript was 
embellished with hundreds of beautiful pictures, and was long preserved as a 
wonderful exhibition of mediaeval skill. It was lost to civihzation, along with many 
other treasures, when the Prussians bombarded Strassburg, ia 1870. 



138 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

was also large. The convent schools reached their highest devel- 
opment about the middle of the thirteenth century, after which 
they began to decline in importance. 

Learning in Ireland and Britain. As was stated earlier in thi? 
chapter, the one part of western Europe where something of thf 
old learning was retained during this period was in Ireland, and 
in those parts of England which had not been overrun by the 
Germanic tribes. Christian civilization and monastic life had 
been introduced into Ireland probably as early as 425 a.d., and 
probably by monastic missionaries from Lerins and Saint Victor 
(see Figure 41). Saint Patrick preached Christianity to the Irish, 
about 440 A.D., and during the. fifth and sixth centuries churches 
and monasteries were founded in such numbers over Ireland that 
the land has been said to have been dotted all over with churches, 
monasteries, and schools. Saint Patrick had been educated in 
the old Roman schools, probably at Tours when it was still an 
important Roman provincial city. Other early missionaries had 
had similar training, and these, not sharing the antipathy to 
pagan learning of the early Italian church fathers, had carried 
Greek and Latin languages and learning to Ireland. Here it 
flourished so well, largely due to the island being spared from 
invasion, that Ireland remained a center for instruction in Greek 
long after it had virtually disappeared elsewhere in western 
Christendom. So much was this the case, says Sandys, in his 
History of Classical Scholarship, "that if any one knew Greek it 
was assumed that he must have come from Ireland." 

In 565 A.D., Saint Columba, an eminent Irish scholar and reli- 
gious leader, crossed over to what is now southwestern Scotland, 
founded there the monastery of lona, and began the conversion 
of the Picts. Saint Augustine landed in Kent in 597, and had 
begun the conversion of the Angles and Saxons and Jutes who 
had settled in southeastern Britain, while shortly afterwards 
the Irish monks from lona began the conversion of the people of 
the north of Britain. The monastery of Lindisfarne was founded 
about 635 A.D. , and soon became an important center of religious 
and classical learning in the north. Irish and English monks also 
crossed in numbers to northern Frankland, and labored for the 
conversion of the Franks and Saxons. 

In 664 A.D., at a council held at Whitby, the Irish Church in 
England and the Roman Church were united, and a great enthu- 
siasm for religion and learning swept over the island. In 670, 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 139 

Theodore of Tarsus and the Abbot Hadrian, whom Bede, the 
scholar and historian of the early English Church, describes as 
men "instructed in secular and divine literature both Greek and 
Latin" (R. 59 a), arrived in England from southern Italy and 
began their work of instructing pupils in Greek and Latin 
(R. 59 b). Both taught at Canterbury, and raised the cathedral 
school there to high rank. In 674 the monastery at Wearmouth 
was founded, and in 682 its companion Yarrow. These were 
endowed with books from Rome and Vienne, and soon became 
famous for the instruction they provided. It was at the twin 
monasteries of Wearmouth and Yarrow that the Venerable Bede 
(673-735), whose Ecclesiastical History of England gives us our 
chief picture of education in Britain in his time, was educated and 
remained as a lifelong student.^ As a result of all these efforts a 
number of northern monasteries, as well as a few of the cathedral 
schools, early became famous for their libraries, scholars, and 
learning. This culture in Ireland and Britain was of a much 
higher standard than that obtaining on the Continent at the 
time, because the classical inheritance there had been less cor- 
rupted. 

The cathedral school at York. One of the schools which early 
attained fame was the cathedral school at York, in northern Eng- 
land. This had, by the middle of the eighth century, come to 
possess for the time a large library, and contained most of the 
important Latin authors and textbooks then known (R. 61). In 
this school, under the scholasticus /Elbert, was trained a youth by 
the name of Alcuin, bom in or near York, about 735 a.d. In a 
poem describing the school (R. 60), he gives a good portrayal 
of the instruction he received, telling how the learned Albert 
moistened thirsty hearts with diverse streams of teaching and 
the varied dews of learning," and sorted out "youths of conspicu- 
ous intelligence" to whom he gave special attention. Alcuin 
afterward succeeded Albert as scholasticus, and was widely known 
as a gifted teacher. Well aware of the precarious condition of 
learning amid such a rude and uncouth society, he handed on to 
his pupils the learning he had received, and imbued them with 

1 He there "enjoyed advantages which could not perhaps have been found any- 
where else in Europe at the time — perfect access to all the existing sources of learn- 
ing in the West. Nowhere else could he acquire at once the Irish, the Roman, the 
Gallician, and the Canterbury learning; the accumulated stores of books which 
Benedict (founder and abbot) had bought at Rome and at Vienne; or the disciplinary 
instruction drawn from the monasteries on the Continent, as well as from Irish mis- 
•liooaries." (Bishop Stubbs, Dictionary of Christian Biography, article on Bede.) 



140 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

something of his own love for it and his anxiety for its preserva- 
tion and advancement. It was this Alcuin who was soon to give 
a new impetus to the development of schools and the preservation 

1 of learning in Frankland. 

\ Charlemagne and Alcuin. In 768 there came to the throne as 
king of the great Frankish nation one of the most distinguished 
and capable rulers of all time — a man who would have been a 
commanding personality in any age or land. His ancestors had 
developed a great kingdom, and it was his grandfather who had 
defeated the Saracens at Tours (p. 113) and driven them back 
over the Pyrenees into Spain. This man Charlemagne easily 
stands out as one of the greatest figures of all history. For five 
hundred years before and after him there is no ruler who matched 
him in insight, force, or executive capacity. He is particularly 
the dominating figure of mediaeval times. Born in an age of law- 
lessness and disorder, he used every effort to civilize and rule as 
intelligently as possible the great Frankish kingdom. Wars he 
waged to civilize and Christianize the Saxon tribes of northern 
Germany, to reduce the Lombards of northern Italy to order, and 
to extend the boundaries of the Frankish nation. At his death, 
in 814, his kingdom had succeeded to most of the western posses- 
sions of the old Roman Empire, including all of what to-day com- 
prises France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland, large portions 
of what is now western Germany and northern Italy, and portions 
of northern Spain. (See Figure 41.) 

Realizing better than did his bishops and abbots the need for 
educational facilities for the nobles and clergy, he early turned 
his attention to securing teachers capable of giving the needed 
instruction. These, though, were scarce and hard to obtain. 
After two unsuccessful efforts to obtain a master scholar to be- 
come, as it were, his minister of education, he finally succeeded 
in drawing to his court perhaps the greatest scholar and teacher 
in all England. At Parma, in northern Italy, Charlemagne met 
Alcuin, in 781, and invited him to leave York for Frankland. 
After obtaining the consent of his archbishop and king, Alcuin 
accepted, and arrived, with three assistants, at Charlemagne's 
court, in 782, to take up the work of educational propaganda in 
Frankland. 

The plight in which he found learning was most deplorable, 
presenting a marked contrast to conditions in England. Learning 
had been almost obliterated during the two centuries of wild dis- 




M 


< 


- 


=: *^ 






■s 


&■£ 


D 


o 




S M 




ffi 


3 


^ 3 






1 


T3-C 




|1h 
H 


C/i 


.£ tn 





t3 


u> 


f c 


'^ 


N 


o: 


■n Fi 


V, 


H 


o 


S-a 


^ 


< 


s 


^ g 


eq 


r1 


1/1 


3 S 


hJ 




3 
O 
i-i 


i^ 


W 


« 


•O 


■^ 3 


^ 


h-l 


£ 


bc.S 




^ 


" 


J2 -c 



PL, 



Ho 




PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 141 

order from 600 on. From 600 to 850 has often been called the 
darkest period of the Dark Ages, and Alcuin arrived when Frank- 
land was at its worst. The monastic and cathedral schools which 
had been established earlier had in large part been broken up, 
and the monasteries had become places for the pensioning of royal 
favorites and hence had lost their earlier religious zeal and effec- 
tiveness. The abbots and bishops possessed but little learning, 
and the lower clergy, recruited largely from bondmen, were grossly 
ignorant, greatly to the injury of the Church. The copying of 
books had almost ceased, and learning was slowly dying out. 

The palace school. There had for some time been a form of 
school connected with the royal court, knowTi as the palace school, 
though the study of letters had played but a small part in it. To 
the reorganization of this school Alcuin first addressed himself, 
introducing into it elementary' instruction in that learning of 
which he was so fond. The school included the princes and 
princesses of the royal household, relatives, attaches, courtiers, 
and, not least in importance as pupils, the king and queen. To 
meet the needs of such a heterogeneous circle was no easy task. 

The instruction which Alcuin provided for the younger 
members of the circle was largely of the question and answer 
(catechetical) type, both questions and answers being prepared 
by Alcuin beforehand and learned by the pupils. Fortunately 
examples of Alcuin's instruction have been preserved to us in 
a dialogue prepared for the instruction of Pepin, a son of Charle- 
magne, then sixteen years old (R. 62). With the older mem- 
bers the questions and answers were oral. For all, though, the 
instruction was of a most elementary nature, ranging over the 
elements of the subjects of instruction of the time. Poetry, arith- 
metic, astronomy, the writings of the Fathers, and theology are 
mentioned as having been studied. Charlemagne learned to read 
Latin, but is said never to have mastered the art of writing. It 
was not an easy position for any one to fill. To quote from West's 
description: ^ 

Charles wanted to know everything and to know it at once. His 
strong, uncurbed nature eagerly seized on learning, both as a delight 
for himself and a means of giving stability to his government, and so, 
while he knew he must be docile, he was at the same time imperious. 
Alcuin knew how to meet him, and at need could be either patiently 
jocular or grave and reproving. Thus, on one occasion when he had 

^ West, A. F., Alcuin, pp. 45-47. 



142 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

been informed of the great learning of Augustine and Jerome, he impa- 
tiently demanded of Alcuin, "Why can I not have twelve clerks such 
as these?" Twelve Augustines and Jeromes! and to be made arise 
at the king's bidding! Alcuin was shocked. "What!" he discreetly 
rejoined, "the Lord of heaven and earth had but two such, and wouldst 
thou have twelve?" But his personal affection for the king was most 
unselfish, and he consequently took great delight in stimulating his 
desire for learning. . . . 

He studied everything Alcuin set before him, but had special anxiety 
to learn all about the moon that was needed to calculate Easter. With 
?uch an eager and impatient pupil as Charles, the other scholars were 
soon inspired to beset Alcuin with endless puzzling questions, and 
there are not wanting evidences that some of them were disposed to 
levity and even carped at his teachings. But he was indefatigable, 
rising with the sun to prepare for teaching. In one of his poetical 
exercises he says of himself that "as soon as the ruddy charioteer of 
the dawn suffuses the liquid deep with the new light of day, the old 
man rubs the sleep of night from his eyes and leaps at once from his 
couch, running straightway into the fields of the ancients to pluck their 
flowers of correct speech and scatter them in sport before his boys." 

Charlemagne's proclamations on education. After reorganiz- 
ing the palace school, Alcuin and Charlemagne turned their 
attention to the improvement of education among the monks and 
clergy throughout the realm. The first important service was 
the preparation and sending out of a carefully collected and 
edited series of sermons to the churches containing, "in two vol- 
umes, lessons suitable for the whole year and for each separate 
festival, and free from error." These Charlemagne ordered used 
in the churches (R. 63). He also says, "we have striven with 
watchful zeal to advance the cause of learning, which has been 
almost forgotten by the negligence of our ancestors; and, by our 
example, also we invite those whom we can to master the study 
of the liberal arts," meaning thereby to incite the bishops and 
clergy to a study of the learning of the mediaeval time. The vol- 
umes and letter were sent out in 786, four years after Alcuin's 
arrival at the court. Further to aid in the revival of learning, 
Charlemagne, in 787, imported a number of monks from Italy, 
who were capable of giving instruction in arithmetic, singing, and 
grammar, and sent them to the principal monasteries to teach. 

In 787 the first general proclamation on education of the 
Middle Ages was issued (R. 64 a) , and from it we can infer much 
as to the state of learning among the monks and clergy of the time. 
In this document the king gently reproves the abbots of his realm 
for their illiteracy, and exhorts them to the study of letters. The 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 143 

signature is Charlemagne's, but the hand is Alcuin's. In it he 
tells the abbots, in commenting on the fact that they had sent 
letters to him telling him that "sacred and pious prayers" were 
being offered in his behalf, that he recognized in "most of these 
letters both correct thoughts and uncouth expressions; because 
what pious devotion dictated faithfully to the mind, the tongue, 
uneducated on account of the neglect of study, was not able to 
express in a letter without error." He therefore commands the 
abbots neither to neglect the study of letters, if they wish to have 
his favor, nor to fail to send copies of his letter "to all your suf- 
fragans and fellow bishops, and to all the monasteries." Two 
years later (789) Charlemagne supplemented this by a further 
general admonition (R. 64 b) to the ministers and clergy of his 
realm, exhorting them to live clean and just lives, and closing 
with : 

And let schools be established in which boys may learn to read. 
Correct carefully the Psalms, the signs in writing, the songs, the calen- 
dar, the grammar, in each monastery and bishopric, and the catholic 
book; because often some desire to pray to God properly, but they pray 
badly because of incorrect books. 

In 802 he further commanded that "laymen shall learn thor- 
oughly the Creed and the Lord's Prayer" (R. 64 c). Finally, in 
his enthusiasm for schools, Charlemagne went so far as to direct 
that "every one should send his son to school to study letters, 
and that the child should remain at school with all diligence until 
he should become well instructed in learning." Charlemagne, of 
course, was addressing freemen of the court and the official 
classes. That he ever meant to include the children of the labor- 
ing classes, or that the idea of compulsory education ever entered 
his head, may well be doubted. 

Effect of the work of Charlemagne and Alcuin. The actual 
results of the work of Charlemagne and Alcuin were, after all, 
rather meager. The difficulties they faced are almost beyond our 
comprehension. Nobles and clergy were alike ignorant and un- 
couth. There seemed no place to begin. It may be said that by 
Charlemagne's work he greatly widened the area of civilization, 
created a new Frankish-Roman Empire to be the inheritor of the 
civilization and culture of the old one, checked the decline in 
learning and reawakened a desire for study, and that he began the 
substitution of ideas for might as a ruling force among the tribes 
under his rule. That for a time he gave an important impetus 



144 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

to the study of letters, which resulted in a real revival in the edu- 
cational work of some of the monasteries and cathedral schools, 
seems certain. Men knew more of books and wrote better Latin 
than before, and those who wished to learn found it easier to do 
so. The state of society and the condition of the times, however, 
were against any large success for such an ambitious educational 
undertaking, and after the death of Charlemagne, the division of 
his empire, and the invasions of the Northmen, education slowly 
declined again, though never to quite the level it had reached 
when Charlemagne came to the throne. In a few schools there 
was no decline, and these became the centers of learning of the 
future. Charlemagne having substituted merit for favoritism in 
his realm, promoting to be bishops and abbots the most learned 
men of his time, many of these became zealous workers in the 
cause of education and did much to keep up and advance learning 
after his death. 

Among the most able of his helpers was Theodulf, Bishop of 
Orleans. He carried out most thoroughly in his diocese the 
instructions of the king, giving to his clerg}^ the following direc- 
tions : 

Let the priests hold schools in the towns and villages, and if any of 
the faithful wish to entrust their children to them for the learning of 
letters, let them not refuse to receive and teach such children. More- 
over, let them teach them from pure affection, remembering that it is 
written, "the wise shall shine as the splendor of the firmament," and 
"they that instruct many in righteousness shall shine as the stars for- 
ever and forever." And let them exact no price from the children for 
their teaching, nor receive anything from them, save what their parents 
may offer voluntarily and from affection. 

Another able assistant was Alcuin himself, who, after fourteen 
years of strenuous service at Charlemagne's court, was rewarded 
by the king with the office of Abbot at the monastery of Saint 
Martin, at Tours. There he spent the last eight years of his life 
in teaching, copying manuscripts, and writing letters to bishops 
and abbots regarding the advancement of religion and learning. 
The work of Alcuin in directing the copying of manuscripts has 
been described. In a letter to Charlemagne, soon after his 
appointment, he reviews his labors, contrasts the state of learning 
in England and Frankland, and appeals to Charlemagne for 
books from England to copy (R. 65) . So important was his work 
as a teacher as well that at his death, in 814, most of the important 
educational centers of the kingdom were in the hands of his former 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 



145 



pupils. Perhaps the most important of all these was Rabanus 
Maurus, who became head of the monastery school at Fulda, 
We shall learn more of him in the next chapter. 

New invasions; the Northmen. Five years after Alcuin went 
to Frankland to help Charlemagne revive learning in his kingdom, 
a fresh series of bar- 

barian invasions be- JMMtMIFMIP^-Zri ^ map of \ 
gan with the raiding TilMlH;! J 'IM^F^^^L/ I ' ^ho^«" tl 

of the English coast 
by the Danes. In 
raid after raid, ex- 
tending over nearly 
a hundred years, 
these Danes grad- 
ually overran all of 
eastern and central 
England from Lon- 
don north to beyond 
Whitby, plundering 
and burning the 
churches and mon- 
asteries, and de- 
stroying books and 
learning everywhere. 
By the Peace of 
Wedmore, effected 
by King Alfred in 
878, the Danes were 
finally given about 
one half of England, and in return agreed to settle down and 
accept Christianity. The damage done by these invaders was 
very large, and King Alfred, in his introduction to an Anglo- 
Saxon translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care (R. 66), gives 
a gloomy picture of the destruction wrought to the churches and 
the decay of learning in England. 

Other bands of these Northmen (Danes and Norwegians) began 
to prey on the northern coast of Frankland, and in the tenth cen- 
tury seized all the coast of what is now northern France and 
down as far as Paris and Tours. From Tours to Corbie (see Fig- 
ure 41) churches and monasteries were pillaged and burned, 
Tours and Corbie with their Hbraries both perishing. Amiens and 




42. Where the Danes ravaged England 



146 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Paris were laid siege to, and disorder reigned throughout northern 
Frankland. The A nnals of Xanten and the A nnals of Sa int Vaast, 
two mediaeval chronicles of importance, give gloomy pictures of 
this period. Three selections will illustrate: 

According to their custom the Northmen plundered East and West 
Frisia and burned . . . towns. . . . With their boats filled with immense 
booty, including both men and goods, they returned to their own 
country.^ 

The Normans inflicted much harm in Frisia and about the Rhine. 
A mighty army of them collected by the river Elbe against the Saxons, 
and some of the Saxon towns were besieged, others burned, and most 
terribly did they oppress the Christians.- 

The Northmen ceased not to take Christian people captive and kill 
them, and to destroy churches and houses and burn villages. Through 
all the streets lay bodies of the clergy, of laymen, nobles, and others, of 
women, children, and suckling babes. There was no road or place 
where the dead did not lie, and all who saw Christian people slaugh- 
tered were filled with sorrow and despair.^ 

After much destruction, Rollo, Duke of the Normans, finally 
accepted Christianity, in 912, and agreed to settle down in what 
has ever since been known as Normandy. From here portions of 
the invaders afterward passed over to England in the Norman 
Conquest of 1066. This was the last of the great German tribes 
to move, and after they had raided and plundered and settled 
down and accepted Christianity, western Europe, after six centu- 
ries of bloodshed and pillage and turmoil and disorder, was at 
last ready to begin in earnest the building-up of a new civilization 
and the restoration of the old learning. 

Work of Alfred in England. The set-back to learning caused by 
this latest deluge of barbarism was a serious one, and one from 
which the land did not recover for a long time. In northern 
Frankland and in England the results were disastrous. The 
revival which Charlemagne had started was checked, and England 
did not recover from the blow for centuries. Even in the parts 
of England not invaded and pillaged, education sadly declined 
as a result of nearly a century of struggle against the invaders 
(R. 66). Alfred, known to history as Alfred the Great, who ruled 
as English king from 871 to 901, made great efforts to revive 
learning in his kingdom. Probably inspired by the exainple of 
Charlemagne, he established a large palace school (R. 68), to the 
support of which he devoted one eighth of his income ; he imported 

^ Annals of Xanten, 846 a.d. ^ Ibid., 851 a.d. ^ Annals of Saint Vaast, 884 a.d. 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 147 

scholars from Mercia and Frankland (R. 67); restored many 
monasteries; and tried hard to revive schools and encourage 
learning throughout his realm, and with some success. ^ With 
the great decay of the Latin learning he tried to encourage the 
use of the native Anglo-Saxon language,- and to this end trans- 
lated books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon for his people. In hij 
Introduction to Gregory's volume (R. 66) he expresses the hope, 
"If we have tranquilhty enough, that all the free-bom youth now 
in England, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves 
to it ... be set to learn . . . English writing," while those who 
were to continue study should then be taught Latin. The com- 
ing of the Normans in 1066, with the introduction of Norman- 
French as the official language of the court and government, foi 
a time seriously interfered with the development of that native 
English learning of which Alfred wrote. 

In the preceding chapter and in this one we have traced briefly 
the great invasions, or migrations, which took place in western 
Europe, and indicated somewhat the great destruction they 
wrought within the bounds of the old Empire. In this chapter 
we have traced the beginnings of Christian schools to replace the 
ones destroyed, the preservation of learning in the monasteries, 
and the efforts of Charlemagne and Alfred to revive leammg in 
their kingdoms. In the chapter which follows we shall describe 
the mediaeval system of education as it had evolved by the 
twelfth century, after which we shall be ready to pass to the 
beginnings of that Revival of Learning which ultimately resulted 
in the rediscovery of the learning of the ancient world. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Picture the gradual dying-out of Roman learning in the Western Empire, 
and explain why pagan schools and learning lingered longer in Britain, 
Ireland, and Italy than elsewhere. 

2. At what time was the old Roman civilization and learning most nearly 
extinct? 

3. Explain how the monasteries were forced to develop schools to maintain 
any intellectual life. 

4. Explain how the copying of manuscripts led to further educational 
development in the monasteries. 

5. Would the convents have tended to attract a higher quality of women 
than the monasteries did of men? Why? , 

1 It is related that ignorant court officials, fearing the king's displeasure, sought 
to learn from their children. 

' Through Alfred's efforts, the compilation of the Anglo-Saxo}i Chronicle was 
begun, that the people of England might be able to read the history of their country 
in their own language. 



148 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

6. Explain why Greek was known longer in Ireland and Britain than else- 
where in the West. 

7. What was the relative condition of learning in Frankland and England, 
about 900 A.D.? 

8. What light is thrown on the conditions of the civilization of the time by 
the small permanent success of the efforts of Charlemagne, looking toward 
a revival of learning in Frankland? 

9. Explain how Latin came naturally to be the language of the Church, 
and of scholarship in western Europe throughout all the Middle Ages. 

10. After reading the story of the migrations, and of the fight to save some 
vestiges of the old civilization, try to picture what would have been the 
result had Rome not built up an Empire, and had Christianity not arisen 
and conquered. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced : 

53. Migne: Forms used in connection with monastery life: 

(o) Form for offering a Child to a Monastery. 

{b) The Monastic Vow. 

(c) Letter of Honorable Dismissal from a Monastery. 

54. Abbot Heriman: The Copying of Books at a Monastery. 

55. Othlonus: Work of a Monk in writing and copying Books. 

56. A Monk: Work of a Nun in copying Books. 

57. Symonds: Scarcity and Cost of Books. 

58. Clark: Anathemas to protect Books from Theft. 

59. Bede: On Education in Early England. 

(a) The Learning of Theodore. 

{h) Theodore's Work for the English Churches. 

(c) How Albinus succeeded Abbot Hadrian. 

60. Alcuin: Description of the School at York. 

61. Alcuin: Catalogue of the Cathedral Library at York. 

62. Alcuin: Specimens of the Palace School Instruction. 

63. Charlemagne: Letter sending out a Collection of Sermons. 

64. Charlemagne: General Proclamations as to Education. 

{a) The Proclamation of 787 a.d. 
{h) General Admonition of 789 a.d. 
(c) Order as to Learning of 802 a.d. 

65. Alcuin: Letter to Charlemagne as to Books and Learning. 

66. King Alfred: State of Learning in England in his Time. 

67. Asser: Alfred obtains Scholars from Abroad. 

68. Asser: Education of the Son of King Alfred. 

69. Ninth-Century Plan of the Monastery at Saint Gall. 



QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Point out the similarity between: 

(a) The form for offering a child to a monastery and the monastic vow 

(53 a-b), and a modern court form for renouncing or adopting a 

child. 
{b) The letter of dismissal from a monastery (53 c), and the modern 

letter of honorable dismissal of a student from a college or normal 

school. 



PRESERVATION OF LEARNING 149 

2. Compare the type of books copied by the Abbot of Saint Martins (55) 
and those copied by the nun at Wessebrunn (56). 

3. Was the evolution of the school-teacher out of the copyist at Ratisbon 
(55)) hy a speciahzation of labor, analogous to the process in more 
modern times? 

4. Explain the mediceval belief in the effectiveness to protect books from 
theft of such anathemas as are reproduced in 58. 

5. What do the selections from Bede (59 a-c) indicate as to the preservation 
of the old learning in the cities of southern Italy? What as to the 
condition of learning and teaching in England in Bede's day? 

6. What is the status of education indicated by the selections from Alcuin, 
on the cathedral school at York (60) and the palace school instruction 
of Pepin (62)? 

7. What was the condition of learning among the higher clergy and monks 
as shown by Charlemagne's proclamations (64)? 

8. What was the extent of the destruction wrought by the Danes in Eng- 
land, as indicated by King Alfred's Introduction to Pope Gregory's 
Pastoral Care (66), and his efforts to obtain scholars from abroad (67)? 

9. What was the character of the education King Alfred provided for his 
son (68)? 

10. Study out the plan of the monastery of Saint Gall (69), and enumerate 
the various activities of such a center. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. 

* Clark, J. W. Libraries in the MedicBval and Renaissance Period. 

* Cutts, Edw. L. Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages. 

* Eckenstein, Lina. Women under Monasticism. 
Leach, A. F. The Schools of MedicBval England. 
Munro, D. C. and Sellery, G. E. Mediceval Civilization. 
Montalembert, Count de. The Monks of the West. 
Taylor, H. O. Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages. 
Thorndike, Lynn. History of Mediceval Europe. 

West, A. F. Alcuin, and the Rise of Christian Schools. 

* Wishart, A. W. Short History of Monks and Monasticism. 



CHAPTER VII 

EDUCATION DURING THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 

II. SCHOOLS ESTABLISHED AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 

I. Elementary instruction and schools 

Monastic and conventual schools. In the preceding chapters 
we found that, by the tenth century, the monasteries had devel- 
oped both inner monastic schools for those intending to take the 
vows (oblati), and outer monastic schools for those not so intend- 
ing (externi). The distinction in name was due to the fact that 
the oblati were from the first considered as belonging to the 
brotherhood, participating in the religious services and helping 
the monks at their work. The others were not so admitted, and 
in all monasteries of any size a separate building, outside the main 
portion of the monastery (see Figure 38), was provided for the 




Fig. 43. An Outer Monastic School 
(After an old wood engraving) 

outer school. A similar classification of instruction had been 
evolved for the convents. 

The instruction in the inner school was meager, and in the 
outer school probably even more so. Reading, writing, music, 
simple reckoning, religious observances, and rules of conduct 
constituted the range of instruction. Reading was taught by 
the alphabet method, as among the Romans, and writing by the 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 151 

use of wax tablets and the stylus. Much attention was given 
to Latin pronunciation, as had been the practice at Rome. As 
Latin by this time had practically ceased to be a living tcmgue, 
outside the Church and perhaps in Central Italy, the difficul- 
ties of instruction were largely increased. The Psalter, or book 
of Latin psalms, was the first reading book, and this was memo- 
rized rather than read. Copy-books, usually wax, with copies 
expressing some scriptural injunction, were used. Music, being 
of so much importance in the church services, received much 
time and attention. In arithmetic, counting and finger reck- 
oning, after the Roman plan, was taught. Latin was used in 
conversation as much as possible, some of the old lesson books 
much resembling conversation books of to-day in the modem 
languages (R. 75). Special attention seems to have been given 
to teaching rules of conduct to the ohlati,^ and much corporal 
punishment was used to facilitate learning. Up to the eleventh 
century this instruction, meager as it was, constituted the whole 
of the preparatory training necessary for the study of theology 
and a career in the Church. In the convents similar schools were 
developed, though, as stated in the last chapter, much more atten- 
tion was given to the education of those not intending to take the 
vows. 

Song and parish schools. In the cathedral churches, and other 
larger non-cathedral churches, the musical part of the service 
was very important, and to secure boys for the choir and for other 
church services these churches organized what came to be known 
as song schools (R. 70) . In these a number of promising boys were 
trained in the same studies and in much the same way as were 
boys in the monastery schools, except that much more attention 
was given to the musical instruction. The students in these 
schools were placed under the precentor (choir director) of the 
cathedral, or other large church, the scholasticus confining his 
attention to the higher or more literary instruction provided. 
The boys usually were given board, lodging, and instruction in 
return for their services as choristers. As the parish churches in 
the diocese also came to need boys for their services, parish 
schools of a similar nature were in time organized in connection 

^ Anderson tells of a monastic student's notebook on conduct which has been 
preserved, and which "prescribes that the young man is to kneel when answering 
the Abbot, not to take a seat unasked, not to loll against the wall, nor fidget with 
things within reach. He is not to scratch himself, nor cross his legs like a tailor. 
He is to wash his hands before meals, keep his knife sharp and clean, not to seize 
or>on vegetables, and not to use his spoon in the common dish." 



152 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

with them. It was out of this need, and by a very slow and 
gradual evolution, that the parish school in western Europe was 
developed later on. 

Chantry schools. Still another type of elementary school, 
which did not arise until near the latter part of the period under 
consideration in this chapter, but which will be enumerated here 
as descriptive of a type which later became very common, came 
through wills, and the schools came to be known as chantry schools, 
or stipendary schools. Men, in dying, who felt themselves particu- 
larly in need of assistance for their misdeeds on earth, would 
leave a sum of money to a church to endow a priest, or sometimes 
two, who were to chant masses, each day for the repose of their 
souls. Sometimes the property was left to endow a priest to say 
mass in honor of some special saint, and frequently of the Virgin 
Mary. As such priests usually felt the need for some other occu- 
pation, some of them began voluntarily to teach the elements of 
religion and learning to selected boys, and in time it became com- 
mon for those leaving money for the prayers to stipulate in the 
will that the priest should also teach a school. Usually a very 
elementary type of school was provided, where the children were 
taught to know the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Salutation to 
the Virgin, certain psalms, to sign themselves rightly with the 
sign of the cross, and perhaps to read and write (Latin). Some- 
times, on the contrary, and especially was this the case later on 
in England, a grammar school was ordered maintained. After 
the twelfth century this type of foundation (R. 73) became quite 
common. 

2. Advanced instruction 

Cathedral and higher monastic schools. As the song schools 
developed the cathedral schools were of course freed from the 
necessity of teaching reading arjd writing, and could then develop 
more advanced instruction. This they did, as did many of the 
monasteries, and to these advanced schools ^those who felt the 
need for more training \^nt. As grammar was, throughout all 
the early part of the Middle Ages, the first and most important 
subject of instruction, the*advanced schools came to be known 
as grammar schools, as well as cathedral or episcopal schools 
(R. 72). The cathedral churches and monasteries of England and 
France early became celebrated for the high character of their 
instruction (R. 71) and the typ^H scholars they produced. AH 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 153 

these schools, though, suffered a serious set-back during the period 
of the Danish and Norman invasions, many being totally destroyed. 
On the continent, due to the greater deluge of barbarism and 
the more unsettled condition of society, more difficulty was 
experienced in getting cathedral schools established, as the fol- 
lowing decree of the Lateran Church Council of 826 indicates: 

Complaints have been made that in some places no masters nor 
endowment for a grammar school is found. Therefore all bishops shall 
bestow all care and diligence, both for their subjects and for other 
places in which it shall be found necessary, to establish masters and 
teachers who shall assiduously teach grammar schools and the princi- 
ples of the liberal arts, because in these chiefly the commandments of 
God are manifest and declared. 

These two types of advanced schools — the cathedral or epis- 
copal and the monastic — formed what might be called the secon- 
dary-school system of the early Middle Ages (Rs. 70, 71), They 
were for at least six hundred years the only advanced teaching 
institutions in western Europe, and out of one or the other of 
these two types of advanced schools came practically all those 
who attained to leadership in the service of the Church in either 
of its two great branches. Still more, out of the impetus given to 
advanced study by the more important of these schools, the uni- 
versities of a later period developed; and numerous private gifts 
of lands and money were made to establish grammar schools to 
supplement the work done by the cathedral and other large 
church schools. 

The Seven Liberal Arts. The advanced studies which were 
offered in the more important monastery and cathedral schools 
comprised what came to be known as TJie Seven Liberal Arts ^ of 
the Middle Ages. The knowledge contained in these studies, 
taught as the advanced instruction of the period, represents the 
amount of secular learning which was intentionally preserved by 
the Church from neglect and destruction during the period of the 
barbarian deluges and the reconstruction of society. 

These Seven Liberal Arts were comprised of two divisions, 
known as: 

I. The Trivium: (i) Grammar; (2) Rhetoric; (3) Dialectic (Logic). 
II. The Quadrivium: (4) Arithmetic; (5) Geometry; (6) Astron- 
omy; (7) Music. 

^ This expression came into common use in the fifth century, when the Christian 
writers summarized the ancient learning under these seven headings or studies, 
following earlier Greek and Roman classifications. (See p. 70). 







TRlfimiVM?PHlLOS0PHI£ 



Fig. 44. The Medieval System of Education summarized 

Allegorical representation of the progress and degrees of education, from an illumi- 
nated picture in the 1508 (Basel) edition of the Margarita Pliilosophica of Greg- 
ory de Reisch. 
The youth, having mastered the Hornbook (ABC's) and the rudiments of learning 
(reading, writing, and the beginnings of music and numbers), advances toward the 
temple of knowledge. Wisdom is about to place the key in the lock of the door of the 
temple. On the dQor is written the word congrmtas, signifying Grammar. (" Gramaire 
first hath for to teche to speke upon congruitc.") On the first and second floors of 
the temple he studies the Grammar of Donatus, and of Priscian. and at the first stage 
at the left on the third floor he studies the Logic of Aristotle, followed by the Rhe- 
toric and Poetry of Tully, thus completing the Trivium. The Arithmetic of Boe- 
thius also appears on the third floor. On the fourth floor he completes the studies 
of the Quadrivhim, taking in order the Music of Pythagoras, Euchd's Geometry, 
and Ptolemy's Astronomy. The student now advances to the study of Philosophy, 
studying successively Physics, Seneca's Morals, and the Theology (or Metaphysics) 
of Peter Lombard, the last being the goal toward which all has been directed. 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 155 

Beyond these came Ethics or Metaphysics, and the greatest of 
all studies, Theology. This last represented the one professional 
study of the early middle-age period, and was the goal toward 
which all the preceding studies had tended. This mediaeval sys- 
tem of education is well summarized in the drawing given on the 
opposite page, taken from an illuminated picture inserted in a 
famous mediaeval manuscript, recopied at Basle, Switzerland, in 
1508. 

Not all these studies were taught in every monastery or cathe- 
dral school. Many of the lesser monasteries and schools offered 
instruction chiefly in grammar, and only a little of the studies 
beyond. Others emphasized the Trivium, and taught perhaps 
only a little of the second group. Only a few taught the full range 
of mediaeval learning, and these were regarded as the great schools 
of the times (R. 71). 

Rhabanus Maurus (776-865), one of the greatest minds of the 
Middle Ages, Abbot for years at Fulda, and a mediaeval textbook 
writer of importance, has left us a good description of each of the 
Seven Liberal Arts studies as they were developed in his day, and 
their use in the Christian scheme of education (R. 74). 

I. THE TRIVIUM 

Of the three studies fonning the Trivium, grammar always came 
first as the basal subject. No uniformity existed for the other 
two. 

I. Grammar. The foundation and source of all the Liberal 
Arts was grammar, it being, according to Maurus, "the science 
which teaches us to explain the poets and historians, and the art 
which qualifies us to speak and write correctly" (R. 74 a). In 
the introduction to an improved Latin grammar,^ published about 
1 1 19, grammar is defined as "The doorkeeper of all the other 
sciences, the apt expurgatrix of the stammering tongue, the serv- 
ant of logic, the mistress of rhetoric, the interpreter of theology, 
the relief of medicine, and the praiseworthy foundation of the 
whole quadrivium." Figure 45, from one of the earliest books 
printed in English, also emphasizes the great importance of 
grammar with the words: ' Wythout whiche science (s)ycherly 
alle other sciences in especial ben of lytyl recomme(d)." In 
addition to grammar in the sense we know the study to-day, 

* The Doctrinale, by Alexander de Villa Die. This was in rhyme, and became 
immensely popular. It was the favorite text until the fifteenth century. 



156 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 





grammar in the old Roman and mediaeval mind also included 
much of what we know as the analytical side of the study of liter- 
ature, such as comparison, analysis, versification, prosody, word 

% Si) fcit; 

no)l),t6 not 

finotbci) t^ 

fomii)p^tk 



Fig. 45. A School: A Lesson in Grammar 

(After a woodcut printed by Caxton in The Mirror of the World, 1481 (?). From 

Blades' Life and Typography of William Caxton, 11, Plate lvi) 
This is a good example of early English printing. Can you read it? This "Old 
English," like the German type (see Fig. 26), shows the change in Latin letters 
which came about with the copying of manuscripts during the Middle Ages. 
After the invention of printing the English soon returned to the Latin forms; the 
Germans are only now doing so. 

formations, figures of speech, and vocal expression (R. 76). These 
were considered necessary to enable one to read understandingly 
the Holy Scriptures, and hence, "though the art be secular," says 
Maurus, "it has nothing unworthy about it." 

The leading textbook was that of Donatus,^ written in the 
fourth century, and Donatus (donat) and grammar came to be 

^ Donatus begins as follows: 

"How many parts of speech are there? 
"What are they?" 



'What is a noun?" 



"How many attributes have nouns?" 
"What are they?" 

Etc., etc. 



"Eight." 

"Noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, par- 
ticiple, conjunction, preposition, 
and interjection." 

"A part of speech with case, signify- 
ing a body or thing particularly or 
commonly." 

"Six." 

"Quality, comparison, gender, num- 
ber, figure, case." 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 157 

synonymous terms. The text by Priscian,^ written in the sixth 
century, was also extensively used. The treatment in each was 
catechetical in form; that is, questions and answers, which were 
learned. The text was of course in Latin, and the teacher usually 
had the only copy, so that the pupils had to learn from memory 
or copy from dictation. The cost of writing-material usually 
precluded the latter method. After sufficient ability in grammar 
had been attained, simple reading exercises or colloquies (R. 75), 
usually of a religious or moralizing nature, were introduced, 
though where permitted the Latin authors, especially Vergil,^ 
were read. At Saint Gall, in Switzerland, and at some other 
places, many Latin authors were read; at Tours, on the other 
hand, we find the learned Abbot Alcuin saying to the monks: 
''The sacred poets are sufficient for you ; there is no reason why you 
should sully your mind with the rank luxuriance of VergU's verse." 
2. Rhetoric. Rhetoric, as defined by Maurus, was "the art 
of using secular discourse effectively in the circumstances of daily 
life," and enabling the preacher or missionary to put the" divine 
message in eloquent and impressive language (R. 74 b). Much 
of the old Roman rhetoric had been taken over by grammar, but 
in its place was added a certain amount of letter and legal docu- 
mentary writmg. The priest, it must be remembered, became 
the secretary and lawyer of the Middle Ages, as well as the priest, 
and upon him devolved the preparation of most of the legal papers 
of the time, such as wills, deeds, proclamations, and other formal 
documents. Accordingly the art of letter-writing ^ and the prepa- 

1 The following from Priscian, reproduced by Graves, illustrates the method of 
instruction as applied to the first book of the Mneid of Vergil. 

"What part of speech is arrnaV^ "A noun." 

" Of what sort? " "Common." 

"Of what class?" "Abstract." 

"Of what gender?" "Neuter." 

"Why neuter?" "Because all nouns whose plurals end in a 

are neuter." 

"Why is not the singular used?" "Because this noun expresses many differ- 
ent things." 

Etc., etc. 

This form of textbook writing was common, not only during the Middle Ages, but 
well into modern times. The famous iVnc England Primer was in part in this form, 
and many early American textbooks in history and geography were written after 
this plan. 

" Vergil, due to his beautiful poetic form and to his love of nature and life, was 
especially guarded against during the early Middle Ages as the most seductive of 
the ancient Latin writers. It is not at all inappropriate that, in Dante's Inferno, 
Vergil should have been the person to guide Dante through hell and purgatory, but 
should not have been allowed to accompany him into paradise. 

^ Textbooks on the art of letter-writing began to appear by the eleventh century, 
explaining in detail how to prepare the five divisions of a letter: (i) the salutation 



158 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ration of legal documents were made a part of the study of rfietoric, 
and some study of both the civil ("worldly ") and canon (church) 
law was gradually introduced. 

3. Dialectic. Dialectic, or logic, says Maurus, is the science of 
understanding, and hence the science of sciences (R. 74 c). By 
means of its aid one was enabled to unmask falsehood, expose 
error, formulate argument, and draw conclusions accurately. The 
study was one of preparation for ethics and theology later on. 
Extracts from the works of Aristotle, prepared by Boethius, and 
later his complete works, constituted the texts used. While 
grammar was the great subject of the seven durmg all the early 
Middle Ages, dialectic later came to take its place. After the rise 
of the universities and the organization of schools of theology, 
with theology more of a rational science and less a matter of 
dogma, dialectic came to hold first place in importance as a prepa- 
ration for the disputations of the later Middle Ages. Theological 
questions formed the practical exercises, and the schools doing 
most in dialectic attracted many students because of this. 

These three studies, constituting the Trivium, based as they 
were directly on the old Roman learning and schools, contained 
more that was within the teaching knowledge of the time than 
did the subjects of the Quadrivium, and also subject-matter which 
was much more in demand. 

n. THE QUADRIVIUM 

The trivial studies, in most cases before the thirteenth century, 
sufficed to prepare for the study of theology, though those few 
who desired to prepare thoroughly also studied the subjects of 
the quadrivium. In schools not offering instruction in this ad- 
vanced group some of the elements of its four studies were often 
taught from the textbooks in use for the Trivium. Particularly 
was this the case during the early Middle Ages, when the knowl- 
edge of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy possessed by west- 
em Europe was exceedingly small. No regular order in the study 
of the subjects of this group was followed. 

4. Arithmetic. Naturally little could be done in this subject 

as long as the Roman system of notation was in use (see footnote, 

I, p. 64), and the Arabic notation was not known in western 

Christian Europe until the beginning of the thirteenth century, 

(salutatio), (2) the art of introducing the subject properly and making a good im- 
pression {captatio benevolentia) , (3) the body of the letter {narratio), (4) how to 
make the request (petitio), and (5) a fitting conclusion {conclusio) . 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 159 

and was not much used for two or three centuries later. So far 
as arithmetic was taught before that time, it was but little in 
advance of that given to novitiates in the monasteries, except 
that much attention was devoted to an absurd study of the prop- 
erties of numbers,^ and to the uses of arithmetic in determining 
church days, calculating the date of Easter, and interpreting 
passages in the Scriptures involving measurements (R. 74 d). 
The textbook by Rhabanus Maurus On Reckoning, issued in 820, 
is largely in dialogue (catechetical) form, and is devoted to de- 
scribing the properties of numbers, ''odd, even, perfect, imperfect, 
composite, plane, solid, cardinal, ordinal, adverbial, distributive, 
multiple, denunciative, etc."; to pointing out the scriptural sig- 
nificance of number; - and to an elaborate explanation of finger 
reckoning, after the old Roman plan (see p. 65). Near the end 
of the tenth century Gerbert,^ afterwards Pope Sylvester II, 
devised a simple abacus-form for expressing numbers, simple 
enough in itself, but regarded as wonderful in its day. This 
greatly simplified calculation, and made work with large numbers 
possible. He also devised an easier form for large divisions, 

^ Anderson reproduces a portion of a chapter by Capella on the number four, 
which is illustrative of the mediaeval study of the properties of number: 

"What shall I call four? in which is a certain perfection of solidarity; for it is 
composed of length and depth, and a full decade is made up from those four numbers 
added together in order, that is, from one, two, three, four. Similarly a hundred is 
made up of the four decades, that is, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, which are a hundred; 
and again four numbers from a hundred on amount to a thousand, that is, loo, 200, 
300, 400. So ten thousand is made up of another series. What is to be said of the 
fact that there are four seasons of the year, four quarters of the heavens, and four 
principles of the elements? There are also four ages of man, four vices, and four 
virtues." 

^ Anderson reproduces a paragraph from Maurus, showing how number was 
applied to Holy Writ. It reads: 

"A real thinker," says Maurus, "will not pass on indifferently when he reads that 
Moses, Elijah, and our Lord fasted forty days. Without strict observance and 
investigation the matter cannot be explained. The number 40 contains the number 
10 four times, by which all is signified which concerns the temporal. For, according 
to the number 4, the days and the seasons run their course. The day consists of 
morning, midday, evening, and night, the year of spring, summer, autumn, winter. 
Further, we have the number 10 to recognize God and the creature. The three 
(trinity) indicated the Creator; the seven, the creature which consists of body and 
spirit. In the latter is the three: for we must love God with our whole heart and 
soul and mind. In the body, on the other hand, the four elements of which it con- 
sists reveal themselves clearly. So if we are moved through that which is signified 
by the number 10 to live in time — for 10 is taken four times — chaste, withholding 
ourselves from worldly lusts, that means to fast forty days. So the Holy Scriptures 
contain suggestively in many different numbers all sorts of secrets which must re- 
main hidden to those who do not understand the meaning of numbers." 

' Gerbert (Q53-1003) was one of the most learned monks of his day, having 
studied in the Saracen schools of Spain. He afterwards became Pope Sylvester II 
(999-1003). Because of his scientific knowledge in an age of superstition he was 
accused of transactions with the devil. 



i6o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Gerbert's form for expressing numbers may be shown from the 
following simple sum in addition: 



abic Form 


Roman Form 




Gerberi 


I's Form 






M 


C 


X I 


1204 


MCCIV 


I 


II 


IV 


538 


DXXXVIII 




V 


III VIII 


2455 


MMCCCCLV 


II 


IV 


V V 


619 


DCXIX 


IV 


VI 
VIII 


I IX 


4816 


MMMMDCCCXVI 


I VI 



No study of arithmetic of importance was possible, however, 
until the introduction of Arabic notation and the use of the zero. 

5. Geometry. This study consisted almost entirely of geog- 
raphy and reasoning as to geometrical forms until the tenth cen- 
tury, when Boethius' work on Geometry, containing some extracts 
from Euclid, was discovered by Gerbert. The geography of 
Europe, Asia, and Africa also was studied, as treated in the text- 
books of the time, and a little about plants and animals as weL 
was introduced. The nature of the geographic instruction may 
be inferred from Figure 46, which reproduces one of the best world 
maps of the day. The main geographical features of the knowr 
world can be made out from this, but many of the mediaeval map? 
are utterly unintelligible. 

To illustrate the reasoning as to geometrical forms which pre- 
ceded the finding of Euclid we quote from Maurus, who says that 
the science of geometry "found realization also at the building of 
the tabernacle and the temple ; and that the same measuring rod, 
circles, spheres, hemispheres, quadrangles, and other figures were 
employed. The knowledge of all this brings to him, who is occu- 
pied with it, no small gain for his spiritual culture^' (R. 74 e). 
After Gerbert's time some geometry proper and the elements of 
land surveying were introduced. The real study of geometry in 
Europe, however, dates from the twelfth century, v/hen Euclid 
was translated into Latin from the Arabic. 

6. Astronomy. In astronomy the chief purpose of the instruc- 
tion was to explain the seasons and the motions of the planets, 
to set forth the wonders of the visible creation, and to enable the 
priests " to fix the time of Easter and all other festivals and holy 
days, and to announce to the congregation the proper celebration 
of them" (R. 74 g). 

Even after Ptolemy's Mechanism of the Heavens (p. 49) and 
Aristotle's On the Heavens had filtered across the Pyrenees from 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED i6l 




Fig. 46. An Anglo-Saxon Map of the World 

(From a tenth-century map in the British Museum) 

This is one of the better maps of the period. Note the mixture of Biblical and 
classical geography (Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Pillars of Hercules), and the animal 
life (lion) introduced in the upper corner. The Mediterranean Sea in the center, 
the Greek islands, the British isles, the Italian peninsula, the Nile, and the northern 
African coast are easily recognized. Western Europe, the best-known part of the 
world at that time, is very poorly done. 

the Saracens, in the eleventh century, the Ptolemaic theory of a 
flat earth located at the center of the heavenly bodies and around 
which they all revolved, while a very pleasing theological concep- 
tion, was absolutely fatal to any instruction in astronomy worth 
while and to any astronomical advance. All mediaeval astron- 
omy, too, was saturated with astrology, as the selection on the 



l62 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



motion of the heavenly bodies reproduced from Bartholomew 
Anglicus shows (R. 77 b), and the supernatural was invoked to 
explain such phenomena as meteors, comets, and eclipses. The 
Copernican theory of the motion of the heavenly bodies was not 
published until 1543, and all our modem ideas date from that time. 
Physics was often taught as a part of the instruction in astron- 
omy, and consisted of lessons on the properties of matter (R. 77 a) 
and some of the simple principles of dynamics. Little else of 
what we to-day know as physics was then known. 

7. Music. Unlike the other studies of the Quadrivium, the 
instruction in music was quite extensive, and from early times a 
good course in musical theory was taught (R. 74 f). Boethius' 
De Musica, written at the beginning of the sixth century, was the 
text used. Music entered into so many activities of the Church 
that much naturally was made of it. The organ, too, is an old 
instrument, going back to the second century B.C., and the organ 

with a keyboard to the 
close of the eleventh cen- 
tury. This instrument 
added much to the value 
of the music course, and 
the hymns composed by 
Christian musicians form 
an important part of our 
>-r^'\ \s^r<n^ 't\ o- //^;sHJi 1—--^ musical heritage.^ The ca- 
\ W W^ H AIL //\ thedral school at Metz and 

the monastery at Saint 
Gall became famous as 
musical centers, and of 
the work of one of the 
teachers of music at Saint 
Gall (Notker) it was written by his biographer: "Through differ- 
ent hymns, sequences, tropes, and litanies, through different songs 
and melodies as well as through ecclesiastical science, the pupils 
of this man made the church of God famous not merely m Ale- 
mannia, but everywhere from sea to sea." 

The great textbooks of the Middle Ages. While the textbooks 
mentioned under the description of each of the Liberal Arts 
formed the basis of the instruction given, most of the instruction 

1 For example, the Stabai Mater and the Dies Ira', two thirteenth-century hymns. 
The former has been called the most pathetic and the latter the most sublime of all 
mediaeval poems. 




Fig. 47. An Early Church Musician 

(From a fourteenth-century manuscript, now in 
the British Museum) 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 163 

before the twelfth century was not given from editions of the 
original works, but from abridged compendiums. Six of these 
were so famous and so widely used that each deserves a few words 
of description. 

1. The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written by Mar- 
tianus Capella, between 410 and 427 a.d., was the first of the five 
great mediaeval textbooks. Mercury, desiring to marry, finally 
settles on the learned maiden Philology, and the seven brides- 
maids — Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, 
Astronomy, and Music — enter in turn at the ceremony and tell 
who they are and what they represent. The speeches of the seven 
maidens summarized the ancient learning in each subject. This 
textbook was more widely used during the Middle Ages than any 
other book. 

2. Boefhiiis. (475-524) was another important mediaeval text- 
book writer, having prepared textbooks on dialectic, arithmetic, 
geometry, music, and ethics. Nearly all of what the Middle Ages 
knew of Aristotle's Logic and Ethics, and of the writings of Plato, 
were contained in the texts he wrote. His De Miisica was used 
in the universities as a textbook until near the middle of the 
eighteenth century. 

3. Cassiodorus ^ (c. 490-585), in his On the Liberal Arts and 
Sciences, prepared a digest of each of the Seven Liberal Arts for 
monastic use, fixing the number at seven by scriptural authority."^ 

4. Isidore, Bishop of Seville (c. 570-636), under the title of 
Etymologies or Origines, prepared an encyclopasdia of the ancient 
learning for the use of the monks and clergy which was intended 
to be a summary of all knowledge worth knowing. Wliile he 
drew his knowledge from the writings of the Greeks and Eomans, 
with many of which he was familiar, contrary to the attitude of 
Cassiodorus he forbade the monks and clergy to make any use of 
them whatever. Cassiodorus was still in part a Roman; Isidore 
was a full medieval. 

5. Alciiin, a learned scholar of the eighth century, whom we 
met in the preceding chapter (p. 140), wrote treatises on the 

1 Cassiodorus was an educated later-Roman, who had been chief minister to 
Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king, and had done much to carry over Latin learning 
and civilization into the new regime. He later founded the monastery of Viviers, 
in southern Italy, and spent the latter part of his life there in writing and contem- 
plation. He urged the monks to study, and those who had no head for learning he 
advised to read Cato and Columella on agriculture, and then to devote themselves 
to it. 

^ "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars." (Prov- 
erbs, IX, I.) 



i64 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

studies of the Trivium and on astronomy which were used in 
many schools in Frankland. 

6. Maurus. In 819 the learned monk of Fulda, Rhabanus 
Maurus, a pupil of Alcuin, issued his volume On the Instruction 
of the Clergy, in the third part of which he describes the uses and 
the subject-matter of each of the Arts (R. 74). He also wrote 
texts on grammar and astronomy, and in 844 issued an encyclo- 
paedia, De Universo, based largely on the work of Isidore, but 
supplemented from other sources. 

These were the great textbooks for the study of the Trivium 
and the Quadrivium throughout all the early Middle Ages. Con- 
sidering that they were in manuscript form and were in one vol- 
ume,^ their extent and scope can be imagined. The teacher usu- 
ally had or had access to a copy, though even a teacher's books in 
that day were few in number (R. 78). Pupils had no books at 
all. These "great" texts were composed of brief extracts, bits 
of miscellaneous information, and lists of names. Their style 
was uninviting. They were at best a mere shell, compared with 
the Greek and Roman knowledge which had been lost. Some of 
these books were in question-and-answer (catechetical) form. 
Their purpose was not to stimulate thinking, but to transmit that 
modicum of secular knowledge needed for the service of the 
Church and as a preparation for the study of the theological 
writings. For nearly eight hundred years education was static, 
the only purpose of instruction being to transmit to the next 
generation what the preceding one had known. For such a 
period such textbooks answered the purpose fairly well. 

3. Training of the nobility 

Tenth-century conditions. Following the death of Charle- 
magne and the break-up of the empire held together by him, a 
period of organized anarchy followed in western Europe. Author- 

^ Abelson, in his monograph on The Seven Liberal Arts, reduces each of these text- 
books to their equivalent in a modern i6mo printed page, with the following results: 

Capella Boethius Cassiodorus Isidore Alcutn Maurus 

Subject (c. 425) (c. 520) (c. S7S) (c 630) (c. 800) (c. 844) 

r Grammar 11 — 25 50 54 55 

< Rhetoric 14 — Sj 14 26 — 

(Dialectic 11 — 18 14 25 — 

{Arithmetic 11 40 2 2 — — 

Geometry 15 30 2 i — — 

Astronomy 9 — 15 3 23 60 

Music II 67 2 12 — — 

Totals in pages 82 137 69^ 96 128 115 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 165 

ity broke down more completely than before, and Europe, for 
protection, was forced to organize itself into a great number of 
small defensive groups. Serfs, ^ freemen lacking land, and small 
landowners alike came to depend on some nobleman for protec- 
tion, and this nobleman in turn upon some lord or overlord. For 
this protection military service was rendered in return. The 
lord lived in his castle, and the peasantry worked his land and 
supported him, fighting his battles if the need arose. This condi- 
tion of society was known diS feudalism, and the feudal relations 
of lord and vassal came to be the prevailing governmental organi- 
zation of the period. Feudalism was at best an organized an- 
archy, suited to rude and barbarous times, but so well was it 
adapted to existing conditions that it became the prevailing form 
of government, and continued as such until a better order of 
society could be evolved. With the invention of gunpowder, the 
rise of cities and industries, the evolution of modem States by the 
consolidation of numbers of these feudal governments, and the 
establishment of order and civilization, feudalism passed out with 
the passing of the conditions which gave rise to it. From the 
end of the ninth to the middle of the thirteenth centuries it was 
the dominant form of government. 

The life of the nobility under the feudal regime gave a certain 
picturesqueness to what was otherwise an age of lawlessness and 
disorder. The chief occupation of a noble was fighting, either in 
his owTi quarrel or that of his overlord. It is hard for us to-day 
to realize how much fighting went on then. Much was said about 
"honor," but quarrels were easily started, and oaths were poorly 
kept. It was a day of personal feuds and private warfare, and 
every noble thought it his right to wage war on his neighbor at 
any time, without asking the consent of any one.^ As a prepara- 
tion for actual warfare a series of mimic encounters, known as 
tournaments, were held, in which it often happened that knights 
were killed. In these encounters mounted knights charged one 
another with spear and lance, performing feats similar to those 

1 The mediaeval serf was the successor of the Roman slave, and was a step upward 
in the process of the evolution of the free man. The serf was tied to the soil and by 
obligations of personal service to the lord. Gradually, due to economic causes, the 
personal service was changed from general to definite service, and finally to a fixed 
rental sum. When a fixed money payment took the place of personal service the 
free man had been evolved. This took place rapidly with the rise of cities and in- 
dustry toward the latter part of the Middle Ages. 

- The German private duel and the American fist fight are the modem survivals 
of the time when personal insults, easily taken, and private grievances were settled 
in the "noble way" by sword and battle-axe and torch. 



i66 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

of actual warfare. This was the great amusement of the period, 
compared with which the German duel, the Mexican bullfight, 
or the American game of football are mild sports. The other 
diversions of the knights and nobles were hunting, hawking, 
feasting, drinking, making love, minstrelsy, and chess. Intel- 
lectual ability formed no part of their accomplishments, and a 
knowledge of reading and writing was commonly regarded as 
effeminate. 

To take this carousing, fighting, pillaging, ravaging, destruc- 
tive, and murderous instinct, so strong by nature among the 
Germanic tribes, and refine it and in time use it to some better 
purpose, and in so doing to increasingly civilize these Gemianic 
lords and overlords, was the problem which faced the Church and 
all interested in establishing an orderly society in Europe. As 
a means of checking this outlawry the Church established and 
tried to enforce the "Truce of God" (R. 79), and as a partial 
means of educating the nobility to some better conception of a 
purpose in life the Church aided in the development of the educa- 
tion of chivalry, the first secular form of education in western 
Europe since the days of Rome, and added its sanction to it after 
it arose. 

The education of chivalry. This form of education was an 
evolution. It began during the latter part of the ninth century 
and the early part of the tenth, reached its maximum greatness 
during the period of the Crusades (twelfth century), and passed 
out of existence b}' the sixteenth. The period of the Crusades 
was the heroic age of chivalry. The system of education which 
gradually developed for the children of the nobility may be 
briefly described as follows: 

I. Page. Up to the age of seven or eight the youth was trained 
at home, by his mother. He played to develop strength, was 
taught the meaning of obedience, trained in politeness and cour- 
tesy, and his religious education was begun. After this, usually 
at seven, he was sent to the court of some other noble, usually his 
father's superior in the feudal scale, though in case of kings and 
feudal lords of large importance the children remained at home 
and were trained in the palace school. From seven to fourteen 
the boy was known as a page. He was in particular attached to 
some lady, who supervised his education in religion, music, cour- 
tesy, gallantry, the etiquette of love and honor, and taught him 
to play chess and other games. He was usually taught to read 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 167 

and write the vernacular language, and was sometimes given a 
little instruction in reading Latin. ^ To the lord he rendered much 
personal service such as messenger, servant at meals, and atten- 
tion to guests. By the men he was trained in running, boxing, 
wrestling, riding, swimming, and the use of hght weapons. 

2. Squire. At fourteen or fifteen he became a squire. "WTiile 
continuing to serve his lady, with whom he was still in company, 
and continuing to render personal service in the castle, the squire 
became in particular the personal servant and bodyguard of the 
lord or knight. He was in a sense a valet for him, making his bed, 
caring for his clothes, helping him to dress, and looking after him 
at night and when sick. He also groomed his horse, looked after 
his weapons, and attended and protected him on the field of com- 
bat or in battle. He himself learned to hunt, to handle shield 
and spear, to ride in armor, to meet his opponent, and to fight 
with sword and battle-axe. As he approached the age of twenty- 
one, he chose his lady-love, who was older than he and who might 
be married, to whom he swore ever to be devoted, even though he 
married some one else. He also learned to rhyme,- to make songs, 
sing, dance, play the harp, and observe the ceremonials of the 
Church. Girls were given this instruction along with the boys, 
but naturally their training placed its emphasis upon household 
duties, service, good manners, conversational ability, music, and 
rehglon. 

3. Knight. At twenty-one the boy was knighted, and of this 
the Church made an impressive ceremonial. After fasting, con- 
fession, a night of vigil in armor spent at the altar in holy medita- 
tion, and communion in the morning, the ceremony of dubbing 
the squire a knight took place in the presence of the court. He 
gave his sword to the priest, who blest it upon the altar. He then 

1 In the earlier days of noblemen's education reading and writing were regarded 
as effeminate, but in the later times the nobles became increasingly literate. By 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many began to pride themselves on their pat- 
ronage of learning. 

^ Rhyming in the vernacular language came to be an important part of the train- 
ing, and many old love songs and songs expressing the joy of life date from this 
period. Chaucer's knight is described as: 

"Syngynge he was or flojtynge [playing], al the day; 

He was as fressh as is the monthe of May. 

Short was his gowne, with sieves longe and wyde. 

Wei cowde he sitte on hors and faire ryde; 

He cowde songes make and wel endite. 

Juste and eek daunce, and v/cl purtreye and write. 

So hote he loved, that by nighterdale [night time] 

He slept no more than doth the nightingale." 



1 68 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



took the oath "to defend the Church, to attack the wicked, to 
respect the priesthood, to protect women and the poor, to pre- 
serve the country in tranquilHty, and to shed his blood, even to 
its last drop, in behalf of his brethren." The priest then returned 
him the sword which he had blessed, charging him "to protect 
the widows and orphans, to restore and preserve the desolate, to 
revenge the wronged, and to confirm the virtuous." He then 
knelt before his lord, who, drawing his own sword and holding it 

over him , said : "In the name 
of God, of our Lady, of thy 
patron Saint, and of Saint 
Michael and Saint George, I 
dub thee knight; be brave 
(touching him with the sword 
on one shoulder), be bold (on 
the other shoulder), be loyal 
(on the head)." 

The chivalric ideals. Such, 
briefly stated, was the educa- 
tion of chivalry. The cathe- 
dral and monastery schools 
not meeting the needs of the 
nobility, the castle school was 
evolved. There was little that 
was intellectual about the 
training given — few books, 
and no training in Latin. 
Instead, the native language 
was emphasized, and squires 
in England frequently learned to speak French. It was essen- 
tially an education for secular ends, and prepared not only for 
active participation in the feuds and warfare of the time, but 
also for the Seven Perfections of the Middle Ages: (i) Riding, 
(2) Swimmmg, (3) Archery, (4) Fencing, (5) Hunting, (6) Whist 
or Chess, and (7) Rhyming. It also represents the first type of 
schooling in the Middle Ages designed to prepare for hfe here, 
rather than hereafter. For the nobihty it was a discipline, just 
as the Seven Liberal Arts was a discipline for the monks and 
clergy. Out of it later on was evolved the education of a gen- 
tleman as distinct from that of a scholar. 

That such training had a civilizing effect on the nobility of the 




Fig. 48. A Squire being knighted 
(From an old manuscript) 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 169 



time cannot be doubted. Through it the Church exercised a 
restraining and civihzing influence on a rude, quarrelsome, and 
impetuous people, who resented restraints and 
who had no use for intellectual discipline. It 
developed the ability to work together for com- 
mon ends, personal loyalty, and a sense of honor 
in an age when these were much-needed traits, 
and the ideal of a life of regulated service in 
place of one of lawless gratification was set up. 
What monasticism had done for the rehgious 
Hfe in dignifying labor and service, chivalry did 
for secular life. The Ten Commandments of 
chivalry, (i) to pray, (2) to avoid sin, (3) to 
defend the Church, (4) to protect widows 
and orphans, (5) to travel, (6) to wage loyal 
war, (7) to fight for his Lady, (8) to defend 
the right, (9) to love his God, and (10) to listen 
to good and true men, while not often followed, 
were valuable precepts to uphold in that age 
and time. In the great Crusades movement 
of the twelfth century the Church consecrated 
the military prowess and restless energy of 
the nobility to her service, but after this wave 
had passed chivalry became formal and stilted 
and rapidly declined in importance (R. 80). 




Fig. 49. 
A Knight of thb 
Time of the First 

Crusade 

(From a manuscript 

in the British 

Museum) 



4. Professional study 

As the one professional study of the entire early Middle-Age 
period, and the one study which absorbed the intellectual energy 
of the one learned class, the evolution of the study of Theology 
possesses particular interest for us. 

The study of Theology. During the earlier part of the period 
under consideration the preparatory study necessary for service 
in the Church was small, and very elementary in character. The 
elements of reading, writing, reckoning, and music, as taught to 
oblati in the monasteries, sufficed. As knowledge increased a 
little the study of grammar at first, and later all the studies of 
the Trivium came to be common as preparatory study, while 
those who made the best preparation added the subjects of the 
Quadriviiim. Ethics, or metaphysics, taught largely from the 
digest of Aristotle's Ethics prepared in the sixth century by 



I70 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Boethius, was the text for this study until about 1200, when 
Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics, Psychology, and Ethics were re- 
introduced into Europe from Saracen sources (R. 87). 

The theological course proper experienced a similar develop- 
ment. At first, as we saw in chapter V, there were but few prin- 
ciples of belief, and the church organization was exceedingly- 
simple. In 325 A.D. the Nicene Creed was formulated (p. 96), 
and the first twenty canons (rules) adopted for the government 
of the clergy. With the translation of the Bible into the Latin 
language {Vulgate, fourth century), the writings of the early 
Latin Fathers, and additional canons and expressions of belief 
adopted at subsequent church councils, an increasing amount 
relating to belief, church organization, and pastoral duties needed 
to be imparted to new members of the clergy. Still, up to the 
eleventh century at least, the theological course remained quite 
meager. In a tenth-century account the following description 
of the theological course of the time is given: ^ 

1. Elements of grammar and the first part of Donatus. 

2. Repeated readings of the Old and New Testaments. 

3. Mass prayers. 

4. Rules of the Church as to time reckoning. 

5. Decrees of the Church Councils. 

6. Rules of penance. 

7. Prescriptions for church services. 

8. Worldly laws. 

9. Collections of homilies (sermons). 

10. Tractates on the Epistles and Gospels. 

11. Lives of the Saints. 

12. Church music. 

It will be seen from this tenth-century course of theological 
study that it was based on reading, writing, and reckoning, and 
a little music as preparatory studies; that it began with the first 
of the subjects of the Trivium, which was studied only in part; 
and that its purpose was to impart needed information as to 
dogma, church practices, canon (church) law, and such civil 
(worldly) law as would be needed by the priest in discharging his 
functions as the notary and lawyer of the age. There is no sug- 
gestion of the study of Theology as a science, based on evidences, 
logic, and ethics. Such study was not then known, and would not 
have been tolerated. There were no other professions to study for. 

^ From the life of the Frankish Abbot, John of Gorze, Abbot at Gorze in the tenth 
century. 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 171 

Systematic instruction begins. About 1 145 Peter the Lombard 
published his Book of Sentences, and this worked a revolution in 
the teaching of the subject. In topics, arrangement, and method 
of treatment the book marked a great advance, and became the 
standard textbook in Theology for a long time. It did much to 
change the study of Theology from dogmas to a scientific subject, 
and made possible schools of Theology in the universities now 
about to arise. In the thirteenth century it was made the offi- 
cial textbook at both the universities of Oxford and Paris. The 
studies of dialectic and ethics were raised to a new plane of 
importance by the publication of this book. 

By the close of the twelfth century the interest of the Church 
in a better-trained clergy had grown to such an extent that theo- 
logical instruction was ordered established wherever there was 
an Archbishop. In a decree issued by Pope Innocent III and the 
General Council it was ordered: 

In every cathedral or other church of sufficient means, a master 
ought to be elected by the prelate or chapter, and the income of a pre- 
bend assigned to him, and in every metropolitan church a theologian 
also ought to be elected. And if the church is not rich enough to pro- 
vide a grammarian and a theologian, it shall provide for the theologian 
from the revenues of his church, and cause provision to be made for 
the grammarian in some church of his city or diocese.^ 

We also, in the early thirteenth century, find bishops enforcing 
theological training on future priests by orders of which the fol- 
lowing is a type: 

Hugh of Scawby, clerk, presented by Nigel Costentin to the church 
of (Potter) Hanworth, was admitted and canonically instituted in it 
as parson, on condition that he comes to the next orders to be ordained 
subdeacon. But on account of the insufificiency of his grammar, the 
lord bishop ordered him on pain of loss of his benefice to attend school. 
And the Dean of Wyville was ordered to induct him into corporal 
possession of the said church in form aforesaid, and to inform the lord 
bishop if he does not attend school. ^ 

5. Characteristics of mediceval education 

Foundations laid for a new order. The education which we 
have just described covers the period from the time of the down- 
fall of Rome to the twelfth or the thirteenth centur^^ It repre- 
sents what the Church evolved to replace that which it and the 

^ Leach, A. F., Educational Charters, p. 143. 
* Ibid., p. 147. 



172 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

barbarians had destroyed. Meager as it still was, after seven or 
eight centuries of effort, it nevertheless presents certain clearly 
marked lines of development. The beginnings of a new Christian 
civilization among the tribes which had invaded and overrun the 
old Roman Empire are evident, and, toward the latter part of the 
Middle Ages, we note the development of a number of centers of 
learning (R. 71) and the beginnings of that specialization of knowl- 
edge (church doctrine, classical learning, music, logic and ethics, 
theology), at different church and monastery schools, which prom- 
ised much for the future of learning. We also notice, and will 
see the same evidence in the following chapter, the beginnings 
of a class of scholarly men, though the scholarship is very limited 
in scope and along lines thoroughly approved by the Church. 

In education proper, in the sense that we understand it, the 
schools provided were still for a very limited class, and secondary 
rather than elementary in nature. They were intended to meet 
the needs of an institution rather than of a people, and to prepare 
those who studied in them for service to that institution. That 
institution, too, had concentrated its efforts on preparing its mem- 
bers for life m another world, and not for life or service in this. 
There were as yet no independent schools or scholars, the monks 
and clergy represented the one learned class, Theology was the 
one professional study, the ability to read and write was not 
regarded by noble or commoner as of any particular importance, 
and all book knowledge was in a language which the people did 
not understand when they heard it and could not read. Society 
was as yet composed of three classes — feudal warriors, who 
spent their time in amusements or fighting, and who had evolved 
a form of knightly training for their children; privileged priests 
and monks and nuns, who controlled all book learning and oppor- 
tunities for profes?ional advancement; and the great mass of 
working peasants, engaged chiefly in agriculture, and belonging 
to and helping to fight the battles of their protecting lord. 

For these peasants there was as yet no education aside from 
what the Church gave through her watchful oversight and her 
religious services (R. 81), and but little leisure, freedom, wealth, 
security, or economic need to make such education possible or 
desirable. Moreover, the other-worldly attitude of the Church 
made such education seem unnecessary. It was still the educa- 
tion of a few for institutional purposes, though here and there, 
by the close of the twelfth century, the Church was beginning to 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 173 

urge its members to provide some education for their children 
(R. 82), and the world was at last getting ready for the evolution 
of the independent scholar, and soon would be ready for the 
evolution of schools to meet secular needs. 

Repressive attitude of the mediaeval Church. The great work 
of the Church during this period, as we see it to-day, was to assim- 
ilate and sufhciently civilize the barbarians to make possible a 
new civilization, based on knowledge and reason rather than force. 
To this end the Church had interposed her authority against bar- 
barian force, and had slowly won the contest. Almost of neces- 
sity the Church had been compelled to insist upon her way, and 
this type of absolutism in church government had been extended 
to most other matters. The Bible, or rather the interpretations 
of it which church councils, popes, bishops, and theological writ- 
ers had made, became authoritative, and disobedience or doubt 
became sinful in the eyes of the Church.' The Scriptures were 
made the authority for everything, and interpretations the most 
fantastic were made of scriptural verses. Unquestioning belief 
was extended to many other matters, with the result that tales 
the most wonderful were recounted and believed. To question, 
to doubt, to disbelieve — these were among the deadly sins of 
the early Middle Ages. This attitude of mind undoubtedly had 
its value in assimilating and civilizing the barbarians, and prob- 
ably was a necessity at the time, but it was bad for the future of 
the Church as an institution, and utterly opposed to scientific 
inquiry and intellectual progress. Monroe well expresses the 
situation which came to exist when he says: 

The validity of any statement, the actuality of any alleged instance, 
came to be determined, not by any application of rationalistic principle, 
not by inherent plausibility, not by actual inquiry into the facts of the 
case, but by its agreement with religious feelings or beliefs, its effect 
in furthering the influence of the Church or the reputation of a saint — 
in general, by its relationship to matters of faith. Thus it happens 
that the chronicles of the monks and the lives of the saints, charming 
and interesting as they are in their naivete, their simpHcity, their 
trustful credulity, and their pictures of a life and an attitude of mind 

'■ Anselm (1033-1109), Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to nog, formulated 
the early mediaeval view when he said: 

"I do not seek to know in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I 
may know." 

"The Christian ought to advance to knowledge through faith, not to come to 
faith through knowledge." 

"The proper order demands that we believe the deep things of Christian faith 
before we presume to reason about them." 



174 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

so remote from ours, are filled with incidents given as facts that test 
the greatest faith, strain the most vivid imagination, and shock that 
innate respect for reality, that it is the purpose of modern education 
to inculcate.^ 

This authoritative and repressive attitude of the Church ex- 
pressed itself in many ways. The teaching of the period is an 
excellent example of this influence. The instruction in the so- 
called Seven Liberal Arts remained unchanged throughout a 
period of half a dozen centuries — so much accumulated knowl- 
edge passed on as a legacy to succeeding generations. It repre- 
sented mere instruction; not education. As a recent writer has 
well expressed it, the whole knowledge and culture contained in 
the Seven Liberal Arts remained "like a substance in suspension 
in a medium incapable of absorbing it; unchanged throughout the 
whole mediaeval period." Inquiry or doubt in religious matters 
was not tolerated, and scientific inquiry and investigation ceased 
to exist. The notable scientific advances of the Greeks, their 
literature and philosophy, and particularly their genius for free 
inquiry and investigation, no longer influenced a world domi- 
nated by an institution preparing its children only for life in a 
world to come. Not until the world could shake off this mediaeval 
attitude toward scientific inquiry and make possible honest doubt 
was any real intellectual progress possible. In a rough, general 
way the turn in the tide came about the beginning of the twelfth 
century, and for the next five centuries the Church was increas- 
ingly busy trying, like King Canute of old, to stop the waves of 
free inquiry and scientific doubt from rising higher against the 
bulwarks it had erected. 

The mediaeval educational system. The educational system 
which the Church had developed by 1200 continued unchanged 
in its essential features until after the great awakening known as 
the Revival of Learning, or Renaissance. This system we have 
just sketched. For instruction in the elements of learning we 
have the inner and outer monastery and convent schools, and, 
in connection with the churches, song schools, and chantry or 
stipendary schools. In these last we have the beginnings of the 
parish school for instruction in the elements of learning and the 
fundamentals of faith for the children of the faithful. In the 
monasteries, convents, and in connection with the cathedral 
churches we have the secondary instruction fairly well organized 

1 Monroe, Paul, Text-Book in the History of Education, p. 258. 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 175 

with the Trivium and the Quadrivium as the basis. At the close 
of the period under consideration in this chapter a few privately- 
endowed grammar schools were just beginning to be founded to 
supplement the work of the cathedral schools (Rs. 141-143). In 
some of the inner monastery schools and a few of the cathedral 



TYPE OF EDUCATION 


6th Cy. 


7th Cy. 


8th Cy. 


9th Cy. 


10th Cy. 


llthCy. 


12th Cy. 


I. Elemsntarv (Latin) 

1. Monastic 

2. Conventual 

3. Cathedral 

4. Endowed 


(Largely r 


fading and 


writing ar 


d song. A. little Lati 


> grammar 


.) ^^^^^ 


II _ 






Outer 








_^ , 






Inner 








~^ 






Cathedral 








— =- ______ 






Parish 








Chantry 


11. SKCONDARr (Latin) 

1. Monastic finner) 

2. Catiiedral 

3. Endowed 


(The Triv 


um, and in 


the larger 


ind later sc 


hools the Q 


uadrivium 


) 

















III. UiGUEK (Latin) 

1. Theology 

2. Art Studies 

3. University 


iQuadrivii 


m.EthicsJ 


hysics.Met 


iphysics.Tt 


eology, Arts, Professional Study,) 












La_w 


IV. Vernaculab 
1. Chivalry 








___ 















Fig. 50. Evolution of Education during the Eari y Middle Ages 

The relative weight of the lines indicates appro.ximate development. The lines 
along which educational evolution took place in the later Middle Ages are here 
clearly marked out. 

schools we also have the beginnings of higher instruction, with 
theology as the one professional subject and the one learned 
career. 

All these schools, too, were completely under the control of the 
Church. There were no private schools or teachers before about 
1200. Only the chivalric education was under the control of 
princes or kings, and even this the Church kept under its super- 
vision. The Church was still the State, to a large degree, and the 
Church, unlike Greece or Rome, took the education of the young 
upon itself as one of its most important functions. The schools 
taught what the Church approved, and the instruction was for 
religious and church ends. The monks who gave instruction in 
the monasteries were responsible to the Abbot, who was in turn 
responsible to the head of the order and through him to the Pope 
at Rome. Similarly the scholasticus in the cathedral school and 



176 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the precentor in the song school were both responsible to the 
Bishop, and again through Archbishop and Cardinal to the Pope, 

The first teacher's certificates and school supervision. Toward 
the latter part of the period under consideration in this chapter 
an interesting development in church school administration took 
place. As the cathedral and song schools increased assistant 
teachers were needed, and the scholasticus and precentor gradually 
withdrew from instruction and became the supervisors of instruc- 
tion, or rather the principals of their respective schools. As song 
or parish schools were established in the parishes of the diocese 
teachers for these were needed, and the scholasticus and precentor 
extended their authority and supervision over these, just as the 
Bishop had done much earlier (p. 97) over the training and 
appointment of priests. By 11 50 we have, clearly evolved, the 
system of central supervision of the training of all teachers in the 
diocese through the issuing, for the first time in Europe, of licenses 
to teach (R. 83). The system was finally put into legal form by 
a decree adopted by a general council of the Church at Rome, in 
1 179, which required that the scholasticus "should have authority 
to superintend all the schoolmasters of the diocese and grant them 
hcenses without which none should presume to teach," and that 
"nothing be exacted for Hcenses to teach" issued by him, thus stop- 
ping the charging of fees for their issuance. The precentor, in a sim- 
ilar manner, claimed and often secured supervision of all elemen- 
tary, and especially all song-school instruction. Teachers were 
also required to take an oath of fealty and obedience (R. 84 b). 

As a result of centuries of evolution we thus find, by 1200, a 
limited but powerful church school system, with centralized con- 
trol and supervision of instruction, diocesan licenses to teach, and 
a curriculum adapted to the needs of the institution in control of 
the schools. We also note the beginnings of secular instruction 
in the training of the nobility for life's service, though even this 
is approved and sanctioned by the Church. The centralized 
religious control thus established continued until the nineteenth 
century, and still exists to a more or less important degree in the 
school systems of Italy, the old Austro-Hungarian States, Ger- 
many, England, and some other western nations. As we shall 
see later on, one of the big battles in the process of developing 
state school systems has come through the attempt of the State 
to substitute its own organization for this religious monopoly of 
instruction. 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 177 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Outline the instruction in an inner monastery school. 

2. Show how the mediicval parish school naturally developed as an offshoot 
of the cathedral schools, and was supplemented later by the endowed 
chantry schools. 

3. What effect did the development of song-school instruction have on 
the instruction in the cathedral schools? 

4. Why was it difficult to develop good cathedral schools during the early 
Middle Ages? 

5. About how much training would be represented to-day by the Seven 
Liberal Arts, (a) assuming the body of knowledge then known? (b) as- 
suming the body of knowledge for each subject known to-day? 

6. What great subject of study has been developed out of one part of the 
study of mediaeval rhetoric? 

7. Why would dialectic naturally not be of much importance, so long as 
instruction in theology was dogmatic and not a matter of thinking? 

8. Characterize the instruction in arithmetic, geometry, and geography 
during the early Middle Ages. Would we consider such knowledge as 
of any value? Explain the attention given to such instruction. 

9. What great modern subjects of study have been developed out of the 
mediaeval subjects of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy? 

10. Compare the knowledge of mediaevals and moderns in (a) geography, 
(b) astronomy. 

11. What does the fact that the few great textbooks were in use for so many 
centuries indicate as to the character of educational progress during the 
Middle Ages? 

12. Was the Church wise in adopting and sanctifying the education of 
chivalry? Why? 

13. What important contributions to world progress came out of chivalric 
education? 

14. What ideals and practices from chivalry have been retained and are 
still in use to-day? Does the Boy Scouts movement embody any of the 
chivalric ideas and training? 

15. Compare the education of the body by the Greeks and under chivalry. 

16. Compare the Athenian ephebic oath with the vows of chivalry. 

17. Picture the present world transferred back to a time when theology was 
the one profession. 

18. What educational theory, conscious or unconscious, formed the basis 
for mediaeval education and instruction? 

19. Explain why the Church, after six or seven centuries of effort, still pro- 
vided schools only for preparation for its own service. 

20. What does the lack of independent scholars during the Middle Ages indi- 
cate as to possible leisure? 

21. Was the attitude of Anselm a perfectly natural one for the Middle Ages? 
Can progress be made with such an attitude dominant? 

22. Contrast the deadly sins of the Middle Ages with present-day concep- 
tions as to education. 

23. Contrast the purposes of mediaeval education and the education of to-day. 

24. When Greece and Rome offered no precedents, how did the Church come 
to so fully develop and control the education which was provided? 

25. Compare the supervisory work of a modern county superintendent with 
that of a scholasticiis of a mediteval cathedral. 



178 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

70. Leach: Song and Grammar Schools in England. 

71. MuUinger: The Episcopal and Monastic Schools. 

72. Statutes: The School at Salisbury Cathedral. 

73. Aldwincle: Foundation Grant for a Chantry School. 

74. Maurus: The Seven Liberal Arts. 

75. Leach: A Mediaeval Latin Colloquy. 

76. Quintilian: On the Importance of the Study of Grammar. 

77. Anglicus: The Elements, and the Planets. 

{a) Of the Elements. 

{b) Of Double Moving of the Planets. 

78. Cott: A Tenth Century Schoolmaster's Books. 

79. Archbishop of Cologne: The Truce of God. 

80. Gautier: How the Church used Chivalry. 

81. Draper: Educational Influences of the Church Services. 

82. Winchester Diocesan Council: How the Church urged that the Ele- 
ments of Religious Education be given. 

83. Lincoln Cathedral: Licenses required to teach Song. 

84. English Forms: Appointment and Oath of a Grammar-School Master. 

(a) Northallerton: Appointment of a master of Song and Grammar. 
{b) Archdeacon of Ely: Oath of a Grammar-School Master to. 



QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Distinguish between song and grammar schools (70), and state what 
was taught in each. Do we have any modern analogy to the same teacher 
teaching both schools, as was sometimes done? 

2. Distinguish between monastic and episcopal (cathedral) schools (71). 
When was the great era of each? How do you explain the change in 
relative importance of the two? 

3. Explain the process of evolution of a parish school out of a chantry 
school. 

4. What was the nature of the cathedral school at Salisbury (72)? 

5. What type of a school was provided for in the Aldwincle chantry (73)? 
Why was it not until after the twelfth century that the endowing of 
schools (73) began to supersede the endowing of priests, churches, and 
monasteries? 

6. How do you explain the need for so many years to master the Seven 
Liberal Arts (74)? 

7. Into what subjects of study have we broken up the old subject of gram- 
mar, as described by Quintihan (76), and how have we distributed them 
throughout our school system? Is technical grammar at present taught 
in the best possible place? 

8. What stage in scientific knowledge do the selections from Anglicus 
(77 a-b) indicate? What rate of scientific progress is indicated by its 
translation and length of use? 

9. What scope of knowledge is represented in the library (78) of the tenth- 
century schoolmaster? What does the list indicate as to the state of 
learning of the time? 

to. Picture the manners and morals of a time which called for the proclama- 
tion of a Truce of God (79). Would the rate of progress of civilization 



SCHOOLS AND INSTRUCTION PROVIDED 179 

and the rate of elimination of warfare up to then, and since, indicate that 
the Church has been very successful in imposing its will? 

11. Show how Chivalry was made a great asset to the Church (80). 

12. How do you explain the much greater simpHcity of the church service 
of modern Protestant churches than that of the Roman (81) or Greek 
Catholic churches? 

13. Explain the form of mild compulsion toward learning which the diocesan 
council of Winchester (82) attempted to institute. 

14. Is the modern state teacher's certificate a natural outgrowth of the 
mediaeval licenses (83) to teach grammar and song? Why did the 
Church insist on these when Rome had not required such? 

15. Show how the modern oath of office of a teacher, and the possibility of 
dismissal for insubordination, is a natural development from the oath 
of fealty and obedience (84 b) of the mediaeval teacher? Is this true also 
for our modern notices of appointment (84 a)? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

* Abelson, Paul. The Seven Liberal Arts. 

Addison, Julia de W. Arts mid Crafts in the Middle Ages. 
Besant, W. The Story of King Alfred. 

* Clark, J. W. The Care of Books. 

Davidson, Thomas. "The Seven Liberal Arts"; in Educational Review, 

vol. II, pp. 467-73. (Also in his Aristotle.) 
Mombert, J. I. History of Charles the Great. 
*Mullinger, J. B. The Schools of Charles the Great. 
Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. I. 
Scheftel, Victor. Ekkehard. (Historical novel of monastic life.) 
Steele, Philip. Meduzval Lore. (Anglicus' Cyclopaedia.) 



CHAPTER VIII 

INFLUENCES TENDING TOWARD A REVIVAL OF 
LEARNING 

I. MOSLEM LEARNING FROM SPAIN 

The Mohammedans in Spain. It will be recalled that in chapN 
ter V we mentioned briefly the Mohammedan migrations of the 
seventh century, and said that we should meet them again a little 
later on as one of the minor forces in the development of our 
western civilization. After their defeat at Tours (73 2^ the Mo- 
hammedans retired into Spain, mbced with the Iberian-Roman- 
Visigothic peoples inhabiting the peninsula, and began to develop 
a civilization there. Figure 33 (p. 114) shows how much of the 
world the Mohammedans had overrun by 800 a.d., and how much 
of Spain was in their possession. 

In Spain they developed a skillful agriculture (R. 85), as, in 
lands as hot and dry as Spain, all agriculture to be successful 
must be. They introduced irrigation, gave special attention to 
the breeding of horses and cattle, and developed garden and 
orchard fruits. To them western Europe is indebted for the 
introduction of many of its orchard fruits, useful plants, and 
garden vegetables, as well as for a number of important manu- 
facturing processes. The orange, lemon, peach, apricot, and 
mulberry trees; the spinach, artichoke, and asparagus among 
vegetables; cotton, rice, sugar cane, and hemp among useful 
plants; the culture of the silkworm, and the manufacture of silk 
and cotton garments; the manufacture of paper from cotton, and 
the making of morocco leather — these are among our debts to 
these people. Though many of the above had been known to 
antiquity, they had been lost during the barbarian invasions and 
were restored only through their re-introduction by the Moslems 

Great absorptive power for learning. The original Arabians 
themselves were not a well-educated people. Before the time ol 
Mohammed we have practically no records as to any education 
among them. When in their religious conquests they overran 
Syria (see Map, p. 103), they came in contact with the sur- 
vivals of that wonderful Greek civilization and learning, and 
this they absorbed with greatest avidity. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL i8l 

It will be recalled, too, that in chapter IV (p. 94), it was 
stated that the early Christians developed very important cate- 
chetical schools in Egypt and Syria, and especially at Alexandria, 
Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, Harran, and Caesarea.' (See Figure 27, 
p. 89.) It was also stated that the Christian instruction im- 
parted at these eastern schools was tinctured through and through 
with Greek learning and Greek philosophic thought. Here mon- 
asteries also were developed in numbers, and Syrian monks had 
for centuries been busy translating Greek authors into Syriac. 
It was also stated (p. 94) that the Eastern or Greek division of 
the Christian Church, of which Constantinople became the cen- 
tral city, was more liberal toward Greek learning than was the 
Western or Latin division of the Church. 

By the fifth century, though, due in part to the breakdown of 
government, the increasing barbarity of the age, and the greater 
control of all thinking by the Church, the Eastern Church lost 
somewhat of its earlier tolerance. In 431 the Church Council of 
Ephesus put a ban on the Hellenized form of Christian theology 
advocated by Nestorius, then Patriarch of Constantinople, and 
drove him and his followers, known as Nestorian Christians, from 
the city. These Nestorians now fled to the old Syrian cities, 
which early had been so hospitable to Greek learning and think- 
ing.- Being now beyond the reach of Christian intolerance and 
in a friendly atmosphere, they remained there, developing excel- 
lent higher schools of the old Greek type, and there the Moham- 
medans found them when they overran Syria, in 635 a.d. 

Mohammedanism now came in contact with an educated peo- 
ple, as it did also in Babylonia (637), in Assyria (640), and in 
Egypt (642), and the need of a better statement of the somewhat 
crude faith now became evident. The same process now took 
place as had occurred earher with Christianity. The Nestorian 

_ 1 "In the school of Nisibis the Church possessed an institution, which for centu- 
ries secured her a system of higher education, and therewith an important social 
and poUtical position. To the older literature, consisting of translations, there was 
added, from the middle of the fifth century onward, a large number of philosophical, 
scientific, and medical treatises belonging to Greek antiquity, and especially the 
works of Aristotle. Through these Greek wisdom and learning, clothed in Syrian 
attire, found a home on these borders of Christendom." (Miiller, D. K., Kirchetv- 
geschichte, vol. i, p. 278.) 

' "By the year 600 A.D. the triumph of the oriental element in Christendom had 
well-nigh banished learning and education from the domain of the Church, giving 
place to a gloomy, unquestioning faith which sank ever deeper and deeper in the 
mire of superstition. What enlightenment survived had found a home beyond 
the limits of the Roman Empire, — in Ireland, in the extreme West; in Syria, in 
the far East." (Davidson, Thomas, History of Education, p. 133.) 



1 82 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Christians and the Syrian monks became the scholars for the 
Mohammedans, and the Mohammedan faith was clothed in Greek 
forms and received a thorough tincturing of Greek philosophic 
thought. Within a century they had translated from Syriac into 
Arabic, or from the original Greek, much of the old Greek learning 
in philosophy, science, and medicine, and the cities of Syria, and 
in particular their capital, Damascus, became renowned for their 
learning. In 760 Bagdad, on the Tigris, was founded, and super- 
seded Damascus as the capital. Extending eastward, these people 
were soon busy absorbing Hindu mathematical knowledge, 
obtaining from them (c. 800) the so-called Arabic notation and 
algebra. 

They develop schools and advance learning. In 786 Haroun- 
al-Raschid became Caliph at Bagdad, and he and his son made it 
an intellectual center of first importance. In all the known 
world probably no city, not even Constantinople, during the 
latter part of the eighth century and most of the ninth , could vie 
with Bagdad as a center of learning. Basra, Kufa, and other 
eastern cities were also noted places. Schools were opened in 
connection with the mosques (churches), a university after the 
old Greek model was founded, a large library was organized, and 
an observatory was built. Large numbers of students thronged 
the city, learned Greeks and Jews taught in the schools, and a 
number of advances on the scientific work done by the Greeks 
were made. A degree of the earth's surface ^ was measured on 
the shores of the Red Sea; the obliquity of the ecliptic was deter- 
mined (c. 830) ; astronomical tables were calculated ; algebra and 
trigonometry were perfected; discoveries in chemistry not known 
in Europe until toward the end of the eighteenth century, and 
advances in physics for which western Europe waited for Newton 
(1642- 1 7 27), were made; and in medicine and surgery their work 
was not duplicated until the early nineteenth century. Their 
scholars wrote dictionaries, lexicons, cyclopaedias, and pharma- 
copoeias of merit (R. 86). 

This eastern learning was now gradually carried to Spain by 
traveling Mohammedan scholars, and there the energy of con- 
quest was gradually turned to the development of schools and 
learning. By 900 a good civilization and intellectual life had 
been developed in Spain, and before 1000 the teaching in Spain, 

1 This was determined as being 56 1/3 miles, which would make the circumference 
of the earth 20,280 miles. The correct distance is 69 miles. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 183 

especially along Greek philosophical lines, had become sufficiently 
known to attract a few adventurous monks from Christian 
Europe. Gerbert (953-1003), afterward Pope Sylvester II (p. 
T59), was one of the first to study there, though for this he was 




The Moslem West 



The Moslem East 



Fig. 51. Showing Centers of Moslem Learning 

accused of having transactions with the Devil, and when he died 
suddenly at fifty, four years after ha\dng been elevated to the 
Papacy, monks over Europe are recorded as having crossed them- 
selves and muttered that the Devil had now claimed his reward. 
A monk from Monte Cassino also studied at Bagdad, and brought 
back some of the eastern learning to his monastery. 

Mohammedan reaction sends scholars to Spain. The great 
intellectual development at Bagdad was in part due to the 
patronage of a few caliphs of large vision, and was of relatively 
short duration. The religious enthusiasts among the Moham- 
medans were in reality but little more zealous for Hellenic learn- 
ing than the Fathers of the Western Church had been. Finally, 
about 1050, they obtained the upper hand and succeeded in driv- 
ing out the Hellenic Mohammedans, just as the Eastern Chris- 
tians had driven out the Nestorians, and these scholars of the 
East now fled to northern Africa and to Spain. ^ 

Almost at once a marked further development in the intellectual 

life of Spain took place. Iii Cordova^ Granada, Toledo, and 

^ The fanaticism of the eastern Arabs now reasserted itself, and higher education 
In the Mohammedan countries of the East drew permanently to a close. A harsh, 
rigid orthodoxy, fatal to educational progress, now triumphed. The coming of the 
Turks only made matters worse, and with their advent education throughout 
Arabia and Asia Minor became a thing of the past. Some day it will be the task of 
western Europe to hand back schools and learning to the Mohammedan East. This 
may be one of the by-products of the great World War 



1 84 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Seville strong universities were developed, where Jews^and Hel- 
lenized Mohammedans taught the learning of the East, and made 
further advances in the sciences and mathematics. Physics, 
chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, physiology, medicine, and 
surgery were the great subjects of study. Greek philosophy also 
was taught. They developed schools and large libraries, taught 
geography from globes, studied astronomy in observatories, 
counted time by pendulum clocks, invented the compass and gun- 
powder, developed hospitals, and taught medicine and surgery 
in schools (R. 86). 

Their cities were equally noteworthy for their magnificent 
palaces,^ mosques, public baths, market-places, aqueducts, and 
paved and lighted streets — things unknown in Christian Europe 
for centuries to come (R. 85). It became fashionable for wealthy 
men to become patrons of learning, and to collect large libraries 
and place them at the disposal of scholars, thus revealing interests 
in marked contrast to those of the fighting nobility of Christian 
Europe. 

Their influence on western Europe. Western Europe of the 
tenth to the twelfth centuries presented a dreary contrast, in 
almost every particular, to the brilliant life of southern Spain. 
Just emerging from barbarism, it was still in an age of general 
disorder and of the simplest religious faith.- The age of reason 
and of scientific experiment as a means of arriving at truth had 
not yet dawned, and would not do so for centuries to come. 
Monks and clerics, representing the one learned class, regarded 
this Moslem science as "black art," and in consequence Europe, 
centuries later, had slowly to rediscover the scientific knowledge 
which might have been had for the taking. Only the book science 
of Aristotle would the Church accept, and even this only after 
some hesitation (Rs. 89, 90). 

Western Europe had, however, advanced far enough through 
the study of the Seven Liberal Arts to desire corrected and addi- 
tional texts of the earlier classical writers, particularly Aristotle, 
and also to be willing to accept some of the mathematical knowl- 

1 The Alhambra, built between 1238 and 1354, at Granada, is an exquisite exam- 
ple of their art. (See plate in vol. i , p. 658, of the Encyclopedia Britannica, nth ed., 
for an illustration of their architecture and art.) 

' It was an age of superstition and miracles, diabolic influences, witchcraft and 
magic, private warfare, trials by ordeal, robber bands, little dirty towns, no roads, 
unsanitary conditions, and miserable homes. Even the nobility had few comforts 
and conveniences, and personal cleanliness was not common. Disease was punish- 
ment for sin and to be cured by prayer, while the insane were scourged to cast out 
the devils within thera. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 185 

edge of these Saracens. It was here that the Moslem learning in 
Spain helped in the intellectual awakening of the rest of Europe. 
Adelhard, an English monk, studied at Cordova about 11 20, and 
took back with him some knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, and 
geometry. His Euclid was in general use in the universities by 
1300. Gerard of Cremona, in Lombardy (1114-1187), who 
studied at Toledo a little later, rendered a similar service for 
Italy. He also translated many works from the Arabic, including 
Ptolemy's Almagest (p. 49), a book of astronomical tables, and 
Alhazen's (Spanish scholar, c. iioo) book on Optics. Other 
monks studied in the Spanish cities during the twelfth century, 
a few of whom brought back translations of importance. Fred- 
erick II ^ employed a staff of Jewish physicians to translate 
Arabic works into Latin, but, due to his continual war against 
the Pope and his final outlawry by the Church, his work possessed 
less significance than it otherwise might have done. Among the 
books thus translated was the medical textbook of Avicenna (980- 
1037), based in turn on the Greek works by Galen and Hippoc- 
rates of Cos (p. 197). This book described 
aihnents and their treatment in detail, 
became the standard textbook in the med- 
ical faculties of the universities, and was 
used until the seventeenth century. An- 
other Moslem whose translated writings 
had great influence on Europe was Aver- 
roes (11 26-1 198) who tried to unite the 
philosophy of Aristotle with Mohamme- 
danism (R. 88). His influence on the 
thinkers of the later Middle Ages was 
large, he being regarded as the greatest 
commentator on Aristotle from the days 
of Rome to the time of the Renaissance. ^^^- 5-- Aristotle 

What Europe obtained through Moslem sources which it prized 
most, though, was the commentary on Aristotle by Averroes and 
the works of Aristotle (R. 88). The list of the books of Aristotle 

^ Frederic II was Emperor of the mediaeval Holy Roman Empire, ruling from 1227 
to 1250. Though a German by birth, he had lived long in Sicily, and spent most of 
his time in Italy after becoming Emperor. He greatly admired the Saracens for 
their learning, and tried to transfer some of their knowledge to Christian Europe. 
He lived, however, at a time when the Papacy was cementing its temporal power 
and the Pope was becoming the Emperor of Europe. This encroachment Frederick 
resisted and tried to break, but without success. At his death the medieval German 
dream of world empire perished; Germany was left a collection of feudal States; and 
the temporal power of the Pope was henceforth for centuries to come undisputed. 




1 86 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

in use in the mediaeval universities by 1300 (R. 87) reveals the 
great importance of the additions made. By the middle of the 
twelfth century Aristotle's Ethics, Metaphysics, Physics, and 
Psychology, as well as some of his minor works, had been trans- 
lated into Latin and were beginning to be made available for 
study. The translation route through which these works had 
been derived was a roundabout one — Greek, Syriac, Arabic, 
Castilian, Latin — and hence the translations could not be very 
accurate, but they sufhced for the needs of Europe until the orig- 
inal Greek versions were recovered when the Venetians and 
Crusaders took and sacked Constantinople, in 1204. These were 
then translated directly into the Latin. Western Europe also 
was ready to use the Arabic (Hindu) system of notation, the ele- 
ments of algebra, Euclid's geometry, and Ptolemy's work on the 
motion of the heavens. These contributions western Europe was 
ready for; the larger scientific knowledge of the Saracens, their 
pharmacopoeias, dictionaries, cyclopaedias, histories, and biog- 
raphies, it was not yet ready to receive. 

One other influence crept in from these peoples which was of 
large future importance — the music and light literature and love 
songs of Spain. There had been developed in this sunny land a 
life of light gayety, chivalrous gallantry, elegant courtesies, and 
poetic and musical charm, and this gradually found its way across 
the Pyrenees. At first it affected Provence and Languedoc, in 
southern France, then Sicily and Italy, and finally the gay con- 
tagion of lute and mandolin and love songs spread throughout all 
western Europe. A race of troubadours and minnesingers arose, 
singing in the vernacular, traveling about the country, and being 
entertained in castle halls. 

Lordlyng listneth to my tale 

Which is merryr than the nightengale 

won admission at any cpstle gate. "Out of these genial but not 
orthodox beginnings the polite literature of modem Europe 
arose." 

11. THE RISE CF SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY 

The eleventh century a turning-point. By the end of the 

eleventh century a distinct turning-point had been reached in 
the struggle to save civilization from perishing. From this time 
on it was clear that the battle had been won, and that a new 
Christian civilization would in time arise in western Europe. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 187 

Much still remained to be done, and centuries of effort would be 
required, but the Church, almost for the first time in more than 
six hundred years, felt that it could now pause to organize and 
systematize its faith. The invasions and destruction of the 
Northmen had at last ceased, the Mohammedan conquests were 
over, almost the last of the Germanic tribes in Europe had settled 
down and had accepted Christianity,^ and the fighting nobility 
of Europe were being held somewhat in restraint by the might 
of the Church, the "Truce of God" (R. 79), and the softening 
influence of chivalric education (R. 80). There were many evi- 
dences, too, by the end of the eleventh century, that the western 
Christian world, after the long intellectual night, was soon to 
awaken to a new intellectual life. The twelfth century, in par- 
ticular, was a period when it was evident that some new leaven 
was at work. 

Up to about the close of the eleventh century western Europe 
had been living in an age of simple faith. The Christian world 
everywhere lay under "a veil of faith, illusion, and childish pre- 
possession." The mysteries of Christianity and the many incon- 
sistencies of its teachings and beliefs were accepted with childlike 
docility, and the Church had felt little call to organize, to syste- 
matize, or to explain. Here and there, to be sure, some question- 
ing monk or cleric had raised questions over matters " of faith 
which his reason could not explain, and had, perhaps, for a time 
disturbed the peace of orthodoxy, but a statement somewhat sim- 
ilar to that made by Anselm of Canterbury (footnote, p. 173), as 
to the precedence of faith over reason, had usually been sufficient 
to silence all inquiry. Once, in the latter part of the eleventh 
century, when a great discussion as to the nature of knowledge 
had taken place among the leaders of the Church, a church council 
had been called to pass upon and give final settlement to the 
questions raised.^ 

' Christianity had not as yet been introduced among the mixed Slavic and Ger- 
manic tribes along the eastern Baltic. In Prussia and Lithuania, where missionary 
efforts had been made from 900 on, success did not come until more than three centu- 
ries later. (See art. "Missions," Ency. Brit., nth ed., vol. 18.) 

2 The more important questions arising concerned the Trinity, the Eucharist, 
and Transubstantiation. 

^ This discussion was over what was known as nominalism vs. realism. Anselm 
of Canterbury (1034-1109), basing his argument largely on some parts of Plato, had 
declared that ideas constituted our real existence. Roscellinus of Compiegne (1050- 
1106), basing his argument on parts of the Organon of Aristotle, had held that ideas 
or concepts are only names for real , concrete things. Anselm, as a realist, contended 
that the human senses are. deceptive, and that revealed truth alone is reliable. 
Roscellinils, aa a nominalist, neld that truth can be reached only through investiga- 



1 88 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Rise of the spirit of inquiry. As the cathedral schools grew in 
importance as teaching institutions, and came to have many 
teachers and students, a few of them became noted as places 
where good instruction was imparted and great teachers were to 
be found. Canterbury in England, Paris and Chartres in France, 
and several of the cities in northern Italy early were noted for 
the quality of their instruction. The great teachers and the keen- 
est students of the time were to be found in the cathedral schools 
in these places, and the monastic schools now lost their earlier 
importance as teaching institutions. By the twelfth century they 
had been completely superseded as important teaching centers 
by the rapidly developing cathedral schools. To these more 
important cathedral schools students now came from long dis- 
tances to study under some noted teacher. Says McCabe: ^ 

The scholastic fever which was soon to influence the youth of 
Europe, had already set in. You could not travel far over the rough 
roads of France without meeting some footsore scholar, making for the 
nearest large monastery or cathedral town. Robbers, frequently in 
the service of the lord of the land, infested every provmce. It was 
safest to don the coarse frieze tunic of the pilgrim, without pockets, 
sling your Uttle wax tablets and stylus at your girdle, strap a wallet 
of bread and herbs and salt on your back, and laugh at the nervous 
folk who peeped out from their coaches over a hedge of pikes and dag- 
gers. Few monasteries refused a meal or a rough bed to the wandering 
scholar. Rarely was any fee exacted for the lesson given. 

The cathedral school in connection with the church of Notre 
Dame ^ became especially famous for its teachers of the Liberal 
Arts (particularly Dialectic) and of Theology, and to this school, 
just as the eleventh century was drawing to a close, came a youth, 
then barely twenty years of age, who is generally regarded as 
having been the keenest scholar of the twelfth century. His 
brilliant intellect soon enabled him to refute the instruction of 
his teachers and to vanquish them in debate. His name was 
Abelard. Before long he himself became a teacher of Grammar 
and Logic at Paris, and later of Theology, and, so widely had he 

tion and the use of reason. The church accepted the realism of Anselm as correct, 
and Roscellinus was compelled to recant. The stifling effect of such an attitude 
toward honest doubt can be imagined. 

1 McCabe, Joseph, Peter Abelard, p. 7. 

2 By the beginning of the eleventh century this cathedral school had become the 
most important in France, a position which it retained for centuries. It was the 
great center for theological study, and drew to it a succession of eminent teachers — 
William of Champeaux, Abelard, Peter the Lombard -^ and, in time, thousands of 
students. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 189 



read, so clearly did he appeal to the reason of his hearers, and so 
incisive was his teaching, that he attracted large numbers of stu- 
dents to his lectures. To assist in his teaching of Theology he 
prepared a little textbook, Sic et Non (Yea and Nay), in which 
he raised for debate many 
questions as to church teach- 
ings (R. 91 b), such as "That 
faith is based on reason, or 
not." In the introduction to 
this textbook he held that 
"constant and frequent ques- 
tioning is the first key to wis- 
dom." (R. 91 a). His method 
was to give the authorities on 
both sides, but to render no 
decision. His boldness in rais- 
ing such questions for debate 
was new, and his failure to 
give the students a decision 
was quite unusual, while his 
claim that reason was ante- 
cedent to faith was startling. 
Even after being driven from 
Paris, in part because of this 
boldness and in part because 
of a most unfortunate incident 
which deservedly ruined his 
career in the Church, stud- 
ents in numbers followed him 
to his retreat and listened to 
his teachings. His method of 
instruction was for the time 
so unusual and his spirit of 
inquiry so searching that he stimulated many a young mind to 
a new type of thinking. One of his pupils was Peter the Lom- 
bard (p. 171 ), who completely redirected the teaching of theology 
with his Book of Sentences (c. 1145). This was based largely 
on Abelard's method, except that a positive and orthodox decision 
was presented for each question raised. 

What took place at Paris also took place, though generally on 
a, smaller scale, at many other cathedral and monastery schools 




Fig. 53. The Cathedral of Notre 
Dame, at Paris 

The present rathedral was begun in 1163, 
consecrated in 1182, and completed in the 
thirteenth century. It is built on an island 
in the Seine, and on the site of a church 
built in the fourth century. The little com- 
munity which grew up about the cathedral 
church formed the nucleus about which the 
city of Paris eventually grew. This cathe- 
dral front, with its statues and beautiful 
carving, formed a type much followed dur- 
ing the great period of cathedral-building 
(thirteenth century) in Europe. The school 
in connection with this cathedral early be- 
came famous. 



IQO HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

of western Europe. The spirit of inquiry had at last been awak- 
ened, the Church was being respectfully challenged by its chil- 
dren to prove its faith, and the learning of the Saracens in Spain, 
which now began to filter across the Pyrenees, added to the 
strength of their challenge. Returning pilgrims and crusaders 
(First Crusade, 1099) also began to ask for an explanation of the 
doubts which had come to them from the contact with Greek and 
Arab in the East. A desire for a philosophy which would explain 
the mysteries and contradictions of the Christian faith found 
expression among the scholars of the time. In the larger cathe- 
dral schools, at least, it became common to discuss the doctrines 
of the Church with much freedom. 

The rise of scholastic theology. The Church, in a very intelli- 
gent and commendable manner, prepared to meet and use this 
new spirit in the organization, systematization, and restatement 
of its faith and doctrine, and the great era of Scholasticism ^ now 
arose. During the latter part of the twelfth and in the thirteenth 
century Scholasticism was at its height ; after that, its work being 
done, it rapidly declined as an edutational force, and the new 
universities inherited the spirit which had given rise to its labors. 

With the new emphasis now placed on reasoning, Dialectic or 
Logic superseded Grammar as the great subject of study, and 
logical analysis was now applied to the problems of religion. The 
Church adopted and guided the movement, and the schools of 
the time turned their energy into directions approved by it. 
Aristotle also was in time adopted by the Church, after the trans- 
lation of his principal works had been effected (Rs. 87, 90), and 
his philosophy was made a bulwark for Christian doctrine through- 
out the remainder of the Middle Ages. For the next four centu- 
ries Aristotle thoroughly dominated all philosophic thinking.^ 
The great development and use of logical analysis now produced 
many keen and subtle minds, who worked intensively a narrow 
and limited field of thought. The result was a thorough reorgani- 
zation and restatement of the theology of the Church. 

' The term scholasticism comes from scholasticiis , because it was chiefly in the 
cathedral schools that scholasticism arose. It means, literally, the method of think- 
ing worked out by the teachers in the cathedral schools. 

2 The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) once said that when he con- 
sidered the inertness of the Middle Ages he was led to think that God had been 
content to make man a two-legged animal, leaving to Aristotle the task of mak- 
ing him a thinking being. The worship of Aristotle is easily explained by the 
great amount of information his works contained, his logical method and skillful 
classification of knowledge, and the way his ideas as to causes fitted into Christian 
reasoning. 







Plate 3. Saint Thomas Aquinas in the School of 

Albertus Magnus 

(After the painting by H. Lerolle) 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REMVAL 191 

This was the work of Scholasticism. The movement was not 
characterized by the evolution of new doctrines, but by a system- 
atization and organization into good teaching form of what had 
grown up during the preceding thousan^ears. To a large degree 
it was also an "accommodatiDn" oijjm old theolog}' to the new 
Aristotelian philosophy which hadj|Bntly been brought back to 
western Europe, and the stateny(||^K the Christian doctrines in 
good philosophic form. Jr*' 

The organizing work of thre Schoolmen. Peter the Lombard 
(1100-1160), whose Book vj Sentences, mentioned above, had so 
completely changed the character of the instruction in Theology, 
began this work of theological reorganization. Albert the Great 
{Albertus Magnus, 1 193-1280) was the first of the great School- 
men, and has been termed "the organizing intellect of the Middle 
Ages." He was a German Dominican monk,^ bom in Swabia, 
and educated in the schools of Paris, Padua, and Bologna. Later 
he became a celebrated teacher at Paris and Cologne. He was 
the first to state the philosophy of Aristotle in systematic fom^ 
and was noted as an exponent of the work of Peter the Lombar 
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1 225-1 274), the greatest and most infk^Ritial 
scholastic philosopher of the Middle Ages, studied first at Monte 
Cassino and Naples, and then at Paris and Cologne, under Al- 
bertus Magnus. He later became a noted teacher of Philosophy 
and Theolog>' at Rome, Bologna, Viterbo, Perugia, and Naples. 
Under him Scholasticism came to its highest development in his 
harmonizing the new Aristotelianism wdth the doctrines of the 
Church. His class teaching was based on Aristotle,- the Vulgate 
Bible, and Peter the Lombard's Book of Sentences. During the 
last three years of his life he wrote his Summa Theologice, a book 
which has ever since been accepted as an authoritative statement 
of the doctrines of the Roman Cathohc Church. 

^ The Dominicans, or Black Friars, were a new teaching and preaching monastic 
order, founded in 1216. It was a revaval of monasticism, directed toward more 
modem ends. The Dominicans established themselves in connection with the new 
imiversities, and sought to control education and to defend orthodoxy. Another 
new order of this same period was that of the Franciscans, or Gray Friars, founded 
by Saint Francis in 1 21 2. Their work was directed still more to preaching, missions, 
and public service. They were a less intellectual but a more democratic brother- 
hood. It was the Franciscans who followed the armies of Spain to Mexico, and 
later built and conducted the missions of the central and southern California coast. 

^ Special translations of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Politics, from the original Greek 
texts, obtained at Constantinople by the Crusaders, were made for Thomas Aquinas 
at his special request, about 1 260, by William of Moerbeke, who knew enough Greek 
to perform the task. This gave him better translations from which to lecture and 
write. 



as ^^ 

ml 



t 

1^ 



192 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The character of the organization made by Peter the Lombard 
and Thomas Aquinas may be seen from an examination of 
their method of presentation, which was dogmatic in form and 
similar in the textbooks of each. The field of Christian Theology 
was divided out into parts, heads, subheads, etc., in a way that 
would cover the subject, and a group of problems, each dealing 
with some doctrinal point, was then presented under each. The 
problem was first stated in the text. Next the authorities and 
arguments for each solution other than that considered as ortho- 
dox were presented and confuted, in order. The orthodox solu- 
tion was next presented, the arguments and authorities for such 
solution quoted, and the objections to the correct solution pre- 
sented and refuted (R. 152). 

Results of their work. The work of the Schoolmen was to 
organize and present in systematic and dogmatic form the teach- 
ings of the Church (R. 92). This they did exceedingly well, and 
the result was a thorough organization of Theology as a teaching 
subject. They did little to extend knowledge, and nothing at all 
o apply it to the problems of nature and man. Their work was 
abstract and philosophical instead, dealing wholly with theolog- 
ical questions. The purpose was to lay down principles, and to 
offer a training in analysis, comparison, classification, and deduc- 
tion which would prepare learned and subtle defenders of the faith 
of the Church. So successful were the Schoolmen in their efforts 
/^that instruction in Theology was raised by their work to a new 
( position of Importance, and a new interest in theological scholar- 
, ship and general learning was awakened which helped not a little 
to deflect many strong spirits from a life of warfare to a life of 
study. They made the problems of learning seem much more 
worth while, and their work helped to create a more tolerant 
attitude toward the supporters of either side of debatable ques- 
tions by revealing so clearly that there are two sides to every 
question. This new learning, new interest in learning, and new 
spirit of tolerance the rising universities inherited. 

III. LAW AND MEDICINE AS NEW STUDIES 

The old Roman cities. The old Roman Empire, it will be re- 
membered, came to be largely a collection of provincial cities. 
These were the centers of Roman civilization and culture. After 
the downfall of the governing power of Rome, the great highways 
were no longer repaired, brigandage became common, trade and 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 193 

intercourse largely ceased, and the provincial cities which were 
not destroyed in the barbarian invasions declined in population 
and number, passing under the control of their bishops who long 
ruled them as feudal lords. During the long period of disorder 
many of the old Roman cities entirely disappeared (R. 49) . Only 
in Italy, and particularly in northern Italy, did these old cities 
retain anything of their earlier municipal life, or anything worth 
mentioning of their former industry and commerce. But even 
here they lost most of their earher importance as centers of cul- 
ture and trade, becoming merely ecclesiastical towns. After the 
death of Charlemagne, the break-up of his empire, and the insti- 
tution of feudal conditions, the cities and towns declined still more 
in importance, and few of any size remained. 
# In Italy feudalism never attained the strength it did in northern 
Eftrope. Throughout all the early Middle Ages the cities there 
retained something of their old privileges, though ruled by prince- 
bishops residing in them. They also retained something of the 
old Roman civilization, and Roman legal usages and some knowl- 
edge of Roman law never quite died out. In other respects they 
much resembled mediaeval cities elsewhere. 

Reestablishment of the Holy Roman Empire. After the dis- 
integration of Charlemagne's empire, the portion of it now known 
as Germany broke up into fragments, largely independent of one 
another, and full of fight and pride. The result there was contin- 
ual and pitiless warfare. This, coupled with the raids of the 
Northmen along the northern coast and the Magyars on the east, 
led to the election of a king in 919 (Henry the Fowler) who could 
estabhsh some semblance of unity and order. By 961 the German 
duchies and small principalities had been so consolidated that a 
succeeding king (Otto I) felt himself able to attempt to reestablish 
the Holy Roman Empire by subjugating Italy and annexing it as 
an appendage under German rule. 

He descended into Italy (961), subjugated the cities, overthrew 
the Papacy, created a pope to his liking, and reestablished the old 
Empire, in name at least. For a century the German rule was 
nominal, but with the outbreak of the conflict in the eleventh 
century between king and pope over the question of which one 
should invest the bishops with their authority (known as the 
investiture conflict, 1075-1122), Pope Gregory VII humbled the 
German king (Henry IV) at Canossa (1077) and won a partial 
wccess. Then followed repeated invasions of Italy, and a cen- 



194 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



tury and a half of conflicts between pope and king before the 
dream of universal empire under a German feudal king ended in 
disaster, and Italy was freed from Teutonic rule. 

The Italian cities revive the study of Roman law. As was 
stated above, Roman legal usages and some knowledge of Roman 




M^ ,0 eia 40 60 80 Too 



Fig. 54. The City-States of Northern Italy 

All of the cities in the valley of the Po, except Turin, Pavia, and Mantua, were 
members of the Lombard League of 1167. 

law had never quite died out in these Italian cities. But, while 
regarded with reverence, the law was not much understood, little 
study was given to it, and important parts of it were neglected 
and forgotten. The struggle with the ruling bishops in the second 
half of the eleventh century, and the discussions which arose dur- 
ing the investiture conflict, caused new attention to be given to 
legal questions, and both the study of Roman (civil) and Church 
(canon) law were revived. The Italian cities stood with the 
Papacy in the struggles with the German kings, and, in 1167, 
those in the Valley of the Po formed what was known as the 
Lombard League for defense. Under the pressure of German 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 195 

oppression they now began a careful study of the known Roman 
law in an effort to discover some charter, edict, or grant of power 
upon which they could base their claim for independent legal 
rights. The result was that the study of Roman law was given 
an emphasis unknown in Italy since the days of the old Empire. 
What had been preserved during the period of disorder at last 
came to be understood, additional books of the law were discov- 
ered, and men suddenly awoke to a realization that what had 
been before considered as of little value actually contained much 
that was worth studying, as well as many principles of import- 
ance that were applicable to the conditions and problems of the 
time. 

The great student and teacher of law of the period was Imerius 
of Bologna (c. 1070-1137), who began to lecture on the Code and 
the Institutes of Justinian about mo to 11 15, and soon attracted 
large numbers of students to hear his interpretations. About this 



fUClj> 



lilV 



IT UIV Ul» 



^ teV5VfaVCIVtmVLN\K:-M05VNV 

^^ulU5llB^^oteptlo^6ultellulmuj?usfppu 
ctilKe^tlU5^UeKl5pel>u5u^eN^lppue^^^l 

eiQ urujf u>* pp ticxu!?iLi5 iMcoppop ev^uos? u 
BlMoe-tirj^uvvTv^UiMeCfrsjJeesti 

le^AtlpOte5XCOKJSIltUlU5U5ppUCTU5UT 

^epe^•lul^e^.rup^x^^exUculU5ua'»ppuctw"^ 

Fig. 55. Fragment from the Recovered "Digest" of Justinian 

Capitals and small letters are here used, but note the difi&culty of reading without 
spacing or punctuation. 

same time the Digest, much the largest and most important part 
of the old law, was discovered and made known, ^ This gave clear- 

1 In 529 the Eastern Emperor, Justinian (see p. 76), directed that an orderly 
compilation be prepared of the many and confused laws and decisions which had 
been made in the Roman Empire, with a view to producing a standard body of 



196 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ness to the whole, as before its discovery the study of Roman law 
was like the study of Aristotle when only parts of the Organon 
were known. Irnerius and his co-laborers at Bologna now col- 
lected and arranged the entire body of Roman civil law {Corpus 
Juris Civilis) (R. 93), introduced the Digest to western Europe, 
and thus made a new contribution of first importance to the list 
of possible higher studies. Law now ceased to be a part of 
Rhetoric (p. 157) and became a new subject of study, with a body 
of material large enough to occupy a student for several years. 
This was an event of great intellectual significance. A new study 
was now evolved which offered great possibilities for intellectual 
activity and the exercise of the critical faculty, while at the same 
time showing veneration for authority. Law was thus placed 
alongside Theology as a professional subject, and the evolution of 
the professional lawyer from the priest was now for the first time 
made possible. 

Canon law also organized as a subject of study. Inspired by 
the revival of the study of civil law, a monk of Bologna, Gratian 
by name, set himself to make a compilation of all the Church 
canons which had been enacted since the Council of Nicaea (325) 
formulated the first twenty (p. 96), and of the rules for church 
government as laid down by the church authorities. This he 
issued in textbook form, about 1142, under the title of Decretum 
Gratiani. So successful were his efforts that his compilation was 
"one of those great textbooks that take the world by storm." It 
did for canon (church) law what the rediscovery of the Justinian 
Code had done for civil law; that is, it organized canon law as a 
new and important teaching subject. 

The Decretum of Gratian was published in three parts, and was 
organized after the same plan as Abelard's Sic et Non, except that 
Gratian drew conclusions from the mass of evidence he presented 
on each topic. It contained 147 "Distinctions" (questions; cases 
of church policy) , upon each of which were cited the church canons 

Roman law in place of the unwieldy mass of contradictory material then existing. 
The result was the Corpus Juris Civilis, worked out by a staff of eminent lawyers 
between 529 and 533 (R. 93). This consisted of 

I. The Code, in twelve books, containing the Statutes of the Emperors: 
II. The Digest, in fifty books, containing pertinent extracts from the opinions of 
celebrated Roman lawyers: 

III. The Institutes, in four books, being an elementary textbook on the law for 
the use of students: 

IV. The Novellce, or new Statutes, the final edition of which was issued in 565, 
and included the laws from 533 on. This was preserved and nsed in the 
East, but came too late to be of much service to the Western Emoire. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 197 



and the views and decisions of important church authorities.^ 
This volume was added to by popes later on,^ so that by the fif- 
teenth century a large body of canon law had grown up, which was 
known as the Corpus Juris Canonici. Canon Law was thus sepa- 
rated from Theology and added to Civil Law as another new sub- 
ject of study for both theological and legal students, and the two 
subjects of Canon and Civil Law came to constitute the work of the 
law faculties in the universities which soon arose in western Europe. 
The beginnings of medical study. The Greeks had made some 
progress in the beginnings of the study of disease (p. 47). Aris- 
totle had given some anatom- 
ical knowledge in his writings 
on animals, and had theorized 
a little about the functions of 
the human body. The real 
founder of medical science, 
though, was Hippocrates, of 
the island of Cos (c. 460-367 
B.C.) , a contemporary of Plato. 
He was the first writer on the 
subject who attempted to base 
the practice of the healing art 
on careful observation and sci- 
entific principles. He substi- 
tuted scientific reason for the 
wrath of offended deities as the 
causes of disease, and tried to 
offer proper remedies in place 
of sacrifices and prayers to the 
gods for cures. His descriptions of diseases were wonderfully 
accurate, and his treatments ruled medical practice for ages.^ He 

* The subdivisions were as follows: 

I. Contained io6 "distinctions," relating to ecclesiastical persons and affairs. 

II. Contained 36 "distinctions," relating to problems arising in the administra- 
tion of canon law. 

III. Contained 5 "distinctions," relating to the ritual and sacraments of the 
Church. 

* The additions were: 

I. The Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, issued in 1234, in five books. 
II. A Supplement to the above by Pope Boniface VIII {Liber Sextus), issued in 
1298. 

III. The Constitutions of Clementine, issued in 13 17. 

IV. Several additions of Papal Laws, not included in any of the above. 

' He held that the body contained four humors — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and 
black bile. Disease was caused by an undue accumulation of some one of the four. 
Hence the ofl6ce of the physician was to reduce this accumulation by some means, 




Fig. 56. The Father of Medicine 
Hippocrates of Cos (460-367? b.c.) 



198 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

knew, however, little as to anatomy. Another Greek writer^ 
Galen^ (131-201 a.d.), wrote extensively on medicine and left an 
anatomical account of the human body which was unsurpassed 
for more than a thousand years. His work was known and used 
by the Saracens. Avicenna (980-1037), an eastern Mohamme- 
dan, wrote a Canon of Medicine in which he summarized the work 
of all earlier writers, and gave a more minute description of symp- 
toms than any preceding writer had done. These works, together 
with a few minor writings by teachers in Spain and Salerno, 
formed the basis of all medical knowledge until Vesahus published 
his System of Human Anatomy, in 1543. 

The Roman knowledge of medicine was based almost entirely 
on that of the Greeks, and after the rise of the Christians, with 
their new attitude toward earthly life and contempt for the human 
body, the science fell into disrepute and decay. Saint Augustine 
(354-430), in his great work on The City of God, speaks with some 
bitterness of "medical men who are called anatomists," and who 
"with a cruel zeal for science have dissected the bodies of the dead, 
and sometimes of sick persons, who have died under their knives, 
and have inhumanly pried into the secrets of the human body to 
learn the nature of disease and its exact seat, and how it might be 
cured." ^ During the early Middle Ages the Greek medical knowl- 
edge practically disappeared, and in its place came the Christian 
theories of satanic influence, diabolic action, and divine punish- 
ment for sin. Correspondingly the cures were prayers at shrines 
and repositories of sacred relics and images, which were found 
all over Europe, and to which the injured or fever-stricken peas- 
ants hied themselves to make offerings and to pray, and then 
hope for a miracle. 

Toward the middle of the eleventh century Salerno, a small 
city delightfully situated on the Italian coast (see Map, p. 194), 
thirty-four miles south of Naples, began to attain some reputa- 

such as blood-letting, purging, blisters, diaphoretics, etc. In the monastery of Saint 
Gall (see Diagram, R. 69) a blood-letting room was a part of the establishment, and 
this practice was continued until well into the nineteenth century. 

1 Galen was born at Pergamon, in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. He studied 
medicine at Pergamon, Smyrna, and Alexandria, and for a time lived in Rome. 
Returning to Pergamon he was appointed physician to the athletes in the gymnasium 
there. He later went back to Rome and became physician to the Emperor Marcus 
Aurelius. He is credited with five hundred works on literature, philosophy, and 
medicine, one hundred and eighteen of which have survived. In medicine he wrote 
on anatomy, physiology, diagnosis, pathology, therapeutics, materia medica, sur- 
gery, hygiene, and dietetics. He was the first to use the pulse as a means of detect- 
ing physical condition. 

' Saint Augustine, The City of God, book xxii, chao. 24.. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 199 

tion as a health resort. In part this was due to the climate and 
in part to its mineral springs. Southern Italy had, more than 
any other part of western Europe, retained touch with old Greek 
thought. The works of Hippocrates and Galen had been pre- 
served there, the monks at Monte Cassino had made some trans- 
lations, and sometime toward the middle of the eleventh century^ 
the study of the Greek medical books was revived here. The 
Mohammedan medical work by Avicenna (p. 185), also early be- 
came known here in translation. About 1065 Constantine of 
Carthage, a converted Jew and a learned monk, who had traveled 
extensively in the East ^ and who had been forced to flee from his 
native city because of a suspicion of ''black art," began to lecture 
at Salerno on the Greek and Mohammedan medical works and 
the practice of the medical art. In 1099 Robert, Duke of Nor- 
mandy, returning from the First Crusade, stopped here to be 
cured of a wound, and he and his knights later spread the fame 
of Salerno all over Europe. The result was the revival of the 
study of Medicine in the West, and Salerno developed into the 
first of the medical schools of Europe. Montpellier, in southern 
France, also became another early center for the study of Medi- 
cine, drawing much of its medical knowledge from Spain. An- 
other new subject of professional study was now made possible, 
and Faculties of Medicine were in time organized in most of the 
universities as they arose. The instruction, though, was chiefly 
book instruction, Galen being the great textbook until the seven- 
teenth century. 

IV. OTHER NEW INFLUENCES AND MOVEMENTS 

The Crusades. Perhaps the most romantic happenings during 
the Middle Ages were that series of adventurous expeditions to 
the then Far East, undertaken by the kings and knights of western 
Europe in an attempt to reclaim the Holy Land from the infidel 
Turks, who in the eleventh century had pushed in and were 
persecuting Christian pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. For 
centuries single pilgrims, small bands of pilgrims, and sometimes 
large numbers led by priest or noble, had journeyed to dis- 
tant shrines, to Rome, and to the birthplace of the Saviour,^ 

1 Often spoken of as Constantius Africanus. It is recorded that he studied the 
arts in Babylon, visited Egypt and India, and returned to his home in Carthage one 
of the most learned men of his age. Suspected of dealings with the Devil he fled to 
Salernum (c. 1065), taught there for many years, published many medical works of 
his own, and finally retired to the monastery of Monte Cassino, dying there in 1087. 

* In 1064 a company of seven thousand is said to have started for the Holy Land. 



200 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



impelled by pure religious devotion, a desire to do penance foi 
sin, or seeking a cure from some disease by prayer and penance. 
It was the spirit of the age. Says Adams: ^ 

A pilgrimage was ... in itself a reli- 
gious act securing merit and reward for 
the one who performed it, balancing a 
certain number for his sins, and making 
his escape from the world of torment 
hereafter more certain. The more dis- 
tant and more difficult the pilgrimage, 
the more meritorious, especially if it led 
to such supremely holy places as those 
which had been sanctified by the pres- 
ence of Christ himself. For the man of 
the world, for the man who could not, or 
would not, go into monasticism, the pil- 
grimage was the one conspicuous act by 
which he could satisfy the ascetic need, 
and gain its rewards. A crusade was a 
stupendous pilgrimage, under especially 
favorable and meritorious conditions. 




Fig. 



57. A Pilgrim of the 
Middle Ages 

(From an old manuscript in the 
British Museum) 



The Mohammedan Arabs who took 
possession of the Holy Land in the 
seventh century had treated the pilgrims considerately, but the 
Turks were of a different stamp. In 107 1 they had defeated the 
Eastern Emperor, captured all Asia Minor, and had taken posses- 
sion of the fortress of Nicaea (Map, p. 183), near Constanti- 
nople. The Eastern Emperor now appealed to Rome for help. 
In 1077 the Turks captured Jerusalem, and returning pilgrims 
soon began to report having experienced great hardships. In 
1095 Pope Urban, in a stirring address to the Council of Clermont 
(France), issued a call to the lords, knights, and foot soldiers of 
western Christendom to cease destroying their fellow Christians 
in private warfare, and to turn their strength of arms against the 
infidel and rescue the Holy Land. The journey was to take the 
place of penance for sin, many special privileges were extended 
to those who went, and those who died on the journey or in battle 
with the infidels were promised entrance into heaven.^ To many 

1 Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d ed., p. 261. 

^ "From Clermont the enthusiasm spread over France like wildfire. Stirring 
preachers, whereof the most notable was Peter the Hermit, set all France, peasant 
and noble, to arming. It was the old gospel of Mohammed recast in Christian guise: 
•— pardon for sin and the spoils of the infidel if victorious ! — a swift road to heaven 
if slain in the battle! Pressed with this hope and enthusiasm, armies to be reckoned 
by the hundreds of thousands were launched upon the East." (Davis, W. S., MedicB- 
val and Modern Europe, x). 05.) 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 201 

nobles and peasants, filled with a desire for adventure and a sense 
of personal sin, no surer way of satisfying either was to be found 
than the long pilgrimage to the Saviour's tomb. In France and 
England the call met with instant response, but with little from 
the nobles of German lands. 

The First Crusade set out in 1096. A second went in 1144, 
and a third in 1187. These were the great Crusades, though five 
others were undertaken during the thirteenth century. Jerusa- 
lem was taken and lost. The Christians quarreled with one 
another and with the Greeks, though with the Saracens they 
established somewhat friendly relations, and a mutual respect 
arose. The armies which went were composed of all kinds of 
people — lords, knights, merchants, adventurers, peasants, out- 
laws — and a spirit of adventure and a desire for personal gain, 
as well as a spirit of religious devotion, actuated many who went. 
In 1204 the Venetians diverted the fourth crusade to the capture 
of Constantinople, and established there an outpost of their great 
commercial empire. The history of the crusades we do not need 
to trace. The important matter for our purpose was the results 
of the movement on the intellectual development of western 
Europe. 

Results of the Crusades on western Europe. In a sense the 
Crusades were an outward manifestation of the great change in 
thinking and ideals which had begun sometime before in western 
Europe. They were at once both a sign and a cause of further 
change. The old isolation was at last about to end, and inter- 
communication and some common ideas and common feelings 
were being brought about. Both those who went and those who 
remained at home were deeply stirred by the movement. Chris- 
tendom as a great international community, in which aU alike 
were interested in a common ideal and in a common fight against 
the infidel, was a new idea now dawning upon the mass of the 
people, whereas before it had been but little understood. 

The travel to distant lands, the sigli^ of citie s-_oL-wealth and 
power, and the_contact with peoples decidedly superior to them- 
selves in civilization, not only excited the imagination and led to 
a broadening of the minds of those who returned, but served as 
well to raise the general level of intelligence in western Europe. 
Some new knowledge also was brought back, but that was not at 
the time of great importance. The principal gain came in the 



202 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

elimination forever of thousands of quarreling, fighting noble- 
men,^ thus giving the kingly power a chance to consolidate hold- 
ings and begin the evolution of modem States; in the marked 
change of attitude toward the old problems ; in the awakening of 
a new interest in the present world; in the creation of new inter- 
ests and new desires among the common people ; in the awakening 
of a spirit of religious unity and of national consciousness; and 
especially in the awakening of a new intellectual life, which soon 
found expression in the organization of universities for study and 
in more extensive travel and geographical exploration than the 
world had known since the days of ancient Rome. The greatest 
of all the results, however, came through the revival of trade, 
commerce, manufacturing, and industry in the rising cities of 
western Europe, with the consequent evolution of a new and im- 
portant class of merchants, bankers, and craftsmen, who formed 
a new city class and in time developed a new system of training 
for themselves and their children. 

The revival of city life. The old cities of central and northern 
Italy, as was stated above (p. 194), continued through the early 
Middle Ages as places of some little local importance. In the 
eleventh century they overthrew in large part the rule of their 
Prince-Bishops, and became little City-Republics, much after the 
old Greek model. Outside of Italy almost the only cities not 
destroyed during the period of the barbarian invasions were the 
episcopal cities, that is cities which were the residences of bishops. 

Outside of Italy the present cities of western Europe either rose 
on the ruins of former Roman provincial cities, or originated about 
some monastery or castle, on or adjacent to land at one time 
owned by monks or feudal lord. An ever-increasing company 
of peasants, themselves little more than serfs in the beginning, 
huddled together in such places for the protection afforded, and 
a walled feudal town eventually resulted (R. 94 a). This later, 
in one way or another, secured its freedom from monastic control 

1 Of the thousands of petty lords and knights who went to the hot East, clad in 
the heavy armor of northern Europe, large numbers left their bones along the way 
or in the Syrian sands, and the landholdings at home reverted to the Crown. This 
was a crushing blow to the old feudal regime, advanced the cause of civilization, and 
helped in the rise of the modern nations. Especially was this true in France and 
England, whose knights went in large numbers to the East. In Germany the knights 
and nobles, as a class, refused to have anything to do with the Crusades, and hence 
they were not killed off or impoverished, but remained to rule and multiply and be 
troublesome. This is one reason for the much earlier rise and greater strength of 
French than German nationality, and one reason why Germany has been so much 
slower than France and England in developing a democratic type of civilization. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 203 

or feudal lord, and evolved into the free city we know to-day. 
Originally each little city was a self-sustaining community. The 
farming and grazing lands lay outside, while the people were 
crowded compactly together within the protecting town walls. 
The need for walls that could be manned for defense, gates that 




Fig. 58. A Typical Medieval Town (Prussian) 

All the elements of a typical mediaeval town are seen here — the walls for defense, 
the watch-towers, the churches, the tall cathedral, the castle, and the high houses 
huddled together. 

could shut out the marauder, the narrow, dirty streets, and the 
lack of any sanitary ideas, all alike tended to keep the towns 
small. ^ The insecurity of life, the constant warfare, the repeated 
failures or destruction of crops without and want within, and the 
high death-rate from disease, all kept down the population. A 
town of a thousand people in the early Middle Ages was a place 
of some importance, while probably no city outside of Italy, 
excepting Paris and London, had ten thousand inhabitants before 
the year 1200. In all England there were but 2,150,000 people, 
according to the Domesday Survey (1086), while to-day the city 
of London alone contains nearly three times that number. 

1 "As presented to the eye, a typical mediaeval city would be a remarkable sight. 
Its extent would be small, both because of the limited population, and the need of 
making the circuit of the walls to be defended as short as possible; but within these 
walls the huge, many-storied houses would be wedged closely together. The narrow 
streets would be dirty and ill-paved — often beset by pigs in lieu of scavengers ; but 
everjrwhere there would be bustling human life with every citizen elbowing close to 
everybody else. Out of the foul streets here and there would rise parish churches of 
marvelous architecture, and in the center of the town extended the great square — 
market-place — where the open-air markets would be held, and close by it, dwarfing 
the lesser churches, the tall gray cathedral — the pride of the community; close by, 
also, the City Hall, an elegant secular edifice, where the council met, where the 
great public feasts could take place, and above which rose the mighty belfry, whence 
clanged the great alarm-bell to call the citizens together in mass meeting, or to don 
armor and man the walls." (Davis, W. S., Medieval atid Modern Europe, p. 146.) 



204 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

After about the year looo a revival of something like city life 
begins to be noticeable here and there in the records of the time 
(R. 94 a), and by iioo these signs begin to manifest themselves 
in many places and lands. By 1200 the cities of Europe were 
numerous, though small, and their importance in the life of the 
times ^ was rapidly increasing (R. 94 b). 

The rise of a city class. As the medifeval towns increased in 
size and importance the inhabitants, being human, demanded 
rights. Between iioo and 1200 there were frequent revolts of 
the people of the mediaeval towns against their feudal overlord, 
and frequent demands were made for charters granting privileges 
to the towns. Sometimes these insurrections were put down with 
a bloody hand. Sometimes, on the contrary, the overlord granted 
a charter of rights, willingly or unwillingly, and freed the people 
from obligation to labor on the lands in return for a fixed money 
payment. Sometimes the king himself granted the inhabitants a 
charter by way of curbing the power of the local feudal lord or 
bishop. The towns became exceedingly skillful in playing off 
lord against bishop, and the king against both. In England, 
Flanders, France, and Germany some of the towns had become 
wealthy enough to purchase their freedom and a charter at some 
time when their feudal overlord was particularly in need of money. 
These charters, or birth certificates for the towns, were carefully 
drawn and officially sealed documents of great value, and were 
highly prized as evidences of local liberty. The document created 
a "free town," and gave to the inhabitants certain specified rights 
as to seK-govemment, the election of magistrates — aldermen, 
mayor, burgomaster — the levying and payment of taxes, and 
the military service to be rendered. Before the evolution of 
strong national governments these charters created hundreds of 
what were virtually little City-States throughout Europe (R. 95). 

In these towns a new estate or class of people was now created 
(R. 96) , in between the ruling bishops and lords on the one hand 
and the peasants tilling the land on the other. These were the 
citizens — freemen, bourgeoisie, burghers. Out of this new class 

* In Italy, in particular, the cities became strong and powerful, and eventually 
overthrew the rule of the bishops and defeated the German Emperor, Frederick I, 
in a long battle to preserve their independence. In Flanders such cities as Ypres, 
Bruges, and Ghent, came to dominate there. In 1302 their burghers defeated the 
J'rench army; and in the sixteenth century they helped to break the autocratic 
power of Spain in a great struggle for human and civic freedom. By the thirteenth 
century Hamburg, Liibeck, Bremen, Augsburg, and Nuremburg were important 
%3inmercial cities in Germany. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 205 

of city dwellers new social orders — merchants, bankers, trades- 
men, artisans, and craftsmen — in time arose, and these nev/ 
orders soon demanded lights and obtained some form of educa- 
tion for their children. The guild or apprenticeship education 
which early developed in the cities to meet the needs of artisans 
and craftsmen (R. 99), and the burgh or city schools of Europe, 



/ ^ 


Churchmen 
Higher nobility. 

\ Lower nobility. 
\ Higher conunercial classes. 


/ ^ 


\ Merchants; manufacturers. 
\ Land owners; professional mCB. 


/ 4 


N. Small shop keepers. 
\. Craftsmen, farmers. 


^y^ 6 


\^Day laborers. 
^"^^Dependenta 



Fig. 59. The Educational Pyramid 
(From Smith, W. R., Educational Sociology, p. 176) 

The concave pyramid suggests comparative numbers. Formal 
education began at the top, and has slowly worked downward. 

which began to develop in the thirteenth and fourteenth centu- 
ries, were the educational results of the rise of cities and the 
evolution of these new social classes. The time would soon be 
ripe for the mysteries of learning to be passed somewhat farther 
down the educational pyramid, and new classes in society would 
begin the mastery of its symbols. 

The revival of commerce. The first city of mediaeval Europe 
to obtain commercial prominence was Venice. She early sold 
salt and fish obtained from the lagoons to the Lombards in the 
Valley of the Po, and sent trading ships to the Greek East. By 
the year 1000 Venetian ships were bringing the luxuries and riches 
of the Orient to Venice, and the city soon became a great trading 
center. There the partially civilized Christian knight "spent 
splendidly," and the Bohemian, German, and Hunnish lords 
came' to buy such of the luxuries of the East as they could af- 
ford. Byjioo Venice was a free City-State, the mistress of the 
Adriatic, and the trade of the East with Christian Europe passed 
over her wharves. From the Crusades she profited greatly, carry- 

1 They came there because, due to their plundering and murdering proclivitieg, 
Venice forbade her merchants to go to them. 



206 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



ing knights eastward in the great fleet she had developed, and 
carpets, fabrics, perfumes, spices, dyes, drugs, silks, and precious 
stones on the return voyage. From Tana and Trebizond her 
traders penetrated far into the interior. Her ships and merchants 
"held the Golden East in fee." By 1400 she was the wealthiest 
and most powerful city in Europe. 

Genoa in time became the great rival of Venice. Marseilles 
also developed a large trade in the Mediterranean and with the 
'Aorth. From these three cities trade routes ran to the cities of 
Flanders, England, and Germany, as is shown in the map below. 
By the thirteenth century, Augsburg, Nuremburg, Magdeburg, 
Hamburg, Llibeck, Bremen, Antwerp, Ghent, Ypres, Bruges, and 




Fig. 60. Trade Routes and Commercial Cities 

London were developing into great commercial cities. Despite 

bad roads, bad bridges,^ bad inns, "robber knights" and bandits, 

the commerce once carried on by Rome with her provinces was 

reviving. Gr£at fairs, or yearly markets, came to be held in the 

large interior towns, to which merchants came from near and far 

1 So poor were the mediaeval bridges that the old prayer-books contained formulas 
for "commending one's soul to God ere starting to cross a bridge." 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 207 

to display and exchange their wares, and, still more important, 
from the standpoint of advancing general education, to exchange 
ideas and experiences. The "luxuries" displayed at these mar- 
kets by traveling merchants from the south — • salt, pepper, spices, 
sugar, drugs, dyestuffs, glass beads, glassware, table implements, 
perfumes, ornaments, underwear, articles of dress, silks, velvets, 
carpets, rugs — dazzled and astounded the simple townspeople 
of western Europe. These fairs became educational forces of a 
high_order. 

The revival of industry and banking. The trading of articles 
at seaports and at the interior city fairs came first, and this soon 
worked a revolution in industry. Instead of agriculture being 
almost the only occupation, and the feeding of the local popula- 
tion the only purpose, with only such arts and industries practiced 
as were needed to supply the wants of the townsmen, it now be- 
came possible to create a surplus to barter at the fairs for luxuries 
from the outside. Local industries, heretofore of but little im- 
portance, now developed into trades, and the manufacture of arti- 
cles for outside sale was begun. At first manufacturing was very 
limited in scope, and confined largely to local handicrafts or the 
imitation of imported articles, but later new and unportant indus- 
tries arose — the glass industry in Venice, the gold and silver 
industry of Florence, the weaving industry at Mainz and Erfurt, 
and the wool industry of Flanders. The craftsman and artisan, 
as well as the merchant and trader, were now developed in the 
towns, and soon became important members of the new social 
order. As serfs and villeins^ were set free from the land- they 
came to the towns, adding more members to the new industrial 
classes (R. 96) . From 1 200 on there was a great revival of indus- 
try in western Europe, and by 1500 merchants and craftsmen had 
won back the place once held by merchants and craftsmen in 
Roman life and trade. 

At Florence a banking class arose, and instead of barter, banks 
and the use of money and credit were developed. From Florence 
this system gradually extended to the other commercial cities. 

1 The peasants were of two classes: (i) serfs, who were not free and who were 
attached to the soil, but unlike slaves had plots of land of their own and could not 
be sold off the land; and (2) villeins, who were personally free, but still were bound 
to their lord for much menial service and for many payments in produce and money. 

2 The Church originally held many serfs and villeins, as did the nobles. It began 
the process of setting them free, encouraging others to do likewise. In time it 
became common, as it did in our Southern States before the Civil War, for nobles in 
dying to set free a certain number of their serfs and villeins. These went as free 
men to the rising cities. 



2o8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Gradually the mediaeval objection to the taking of interest for the 
use^ormoney, which the Church had forbidden in the early Middle 
Ages as "usury" and wicked, was overcome, and Italian bankers 
and merchants led the world in the establishment of that credit 
which has made modem trade and industry possible. With 
money once more in general use as a measure of value, the Arabic 
system of notation in use for commercial transactions, and credit 
at reasonable interest rates provided as a basis for finance, an 
era in trade and commerce and manufacturing set in unknown 
since the days of Roman rule. Order, security, and a wider 
extension of educational advantages now were needed, and nothing 
contributed more to securing these than the growth of wealth and 
manufacturing industries in the towns, and the extension of com- 
merce and the use of money throughout the country. Nothing 
tends so powerfully to demand or secure these things as the pos- 
session of wealth among a people. 

Education for these new social classes. With the evolution of 
these new social classes an extension of education took place 
through the formation of guilds.^ The merchants of the Middle 
Ages traded, not as individuals, nor as subjects of a State which 
protected them, for there were as yet no such States, but as 
members of the guild of merchants of their town, or as members 
of a trading company. Later, towns united to form trading con- 
federations, of which the Hanseatic League of northern Germany 
was a conspicuous example. These burgher merchant guilds 
became wealthy and important socially;- they were chartered by 
kings and given trading privileges analogous to those of a modem 
corporation (R. 95) ; they elbowed their way into affairs of State, 
and in time took over in large part the city governments; they 
obtained education for themselves, and fought with the church 

^ The mediaeval guild was an important institution, and the guild idea was applied 
to many forms of mediaeval associations. Thus we read of guilds of notaries in 
Florence, pleaders' and attorneys' guilds in London, medical guilds and barber- 
surgeons' guilds in various cities, and of the book-writers-and-sellers' guild in Paris. 
In a religious pageant given at York, England, on Corpus Christi Day, 141 5, fifty- 
one different local guilds presented each a scene. (See Cheyney, E. P., English 
Towns and Gilds., Pa. Sources, vol. 11, no. i.) 

2 "The ready money of the merchant was as effective a weapon as the sword of 
the noble, or the spiritual arms of the Church. Very speedily, also, the men of the 
cities began to seize upon one of the weapons which up to that time had been the 
exclusive possession of the Church, and one of the main sources of its power, — 
knowledge and intellectual training. With these two weapons in its hands, wealth 
and knowledge, the Third Estate forced its way into influence, and compelled the 
other two (Estates) to recognize it as a partner with themselves in the management 
of public concerns." (Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d ed., 
p. 299.) 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 209 

authorities for the creation of independent burgh schools;^ they 
began to read books, and books in the vernacular began to be 
written for them; ^ they in time vied with the clergy and the 
nobility in their patronage of learning; they everywhere stood 
with the kings and princes to compel feudal lords to stop warfare 
and plundering and to submit to law and order; ^ and they enter- 
tained royal personages and drew nobles, clergy, and gentry into 
their honorary membership, thus serving as an important agency 
in breaking down the social-class exclusiveness of the Middle Ages, 
In these guilds, which were self-governing bodies debating ques- 
tions and deciding policies and actions, much elementary political 
training was given their members which proved of large impor- 
tance at a later time. 

In the same way the craft guilds rendered a large educational 
service to the small merchant and worker, as they provided the 
techpical and social education of such during the later period of 
the Middle Ages and in early modem times, and protected their 
members from oppression in an age when oppression was the rule. 
With the revival of trade and industry craft guilds arose all over 
western Europe. One of the first of these was the candle-makers' 
guild, organized at Paris in 1061. Soon after we find large num- 
bers of guilds — masons, shoemakers, harness-makers, bakers, 
smiths, wool-combers, tanners, saddlers, spurriers, weavers, gold- 
smiths, pewterers, carpenters, leather- workers, cloth-workers, 
pinners, fishmongers, butchers, barbers — all organized on much 
the same plan. These were the working-men's fraternities or 
labor unions of mediaeval Europe. Each trade or craft became 
organized as a city guild, composed of the "masters," "journey- 
men" (paid workmen), and "apprentices." The great mediaeval 
document, a charter of rights guaranteeing protection, was usu- 
ally obtained. The guild for each trade laid down rules for the 

1 In Hamburg, for example, the city council established four writing schools in 
1402, to which the church authorities objected. The council refused to give them 
up, and for this was laid under the ban of the Church, compelled to recede, admit 
that it had no right to establish such schools, and pay the costs involved in the 
contest. 

^ For example, the three most widely read books of the thirteenth century were 
Reynard the Fox, a profoundly humorous animal epic; The Golden Legend, which so 
deeply impressed Longfellow; and the Romance oj the Rose, for three centuries the 
most read book in Europe. 

' Despite all the criticisms one may offer against business, commerce has always 
been a great civilizing force. While not anxious to pay heavy taxes, the merchant 
has always been willing to pay what has been necessary to support a public power 
capable of maintaining order and security for property. Feudal turmoil, private 
warfare, and plundering are deadly foes of commerce, and these have come to an 
end where commerce and industry have gained the ascendant. 



2IO HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

number and training of apprentices/ the conditions under which 
a "journeyman'* could become a "master," ^ rules for conducting 
the trade, standards to be maintained in workmanship, prices to 
be charged, and dues and obligations of members (R. 97). They 
supervised work in their craft, cared for the sick, buried the dead, 
and looked after the widows and orphans. Often they provided 
one or more priests of their own to minister to the families of their 
craft, and gradually the custom arose of having the priest also 
teach something of the rudiments of religion and learning to the 
children of the members. In time money and lands were set 
aside or left for such purposes, and a form of chantry school, 
which later evolved into a regular school, often with instruction 
in higher studies added, was created for the children of members^ 
of the guild (R. 98). 

Apprenticeship education. For centuries after the revival of 
trade and industry all manufacturing was on a small scale, and 
in the home-industry stage. There was, of course, no machinery, 
and only the simple tools known from ancient times were used. 
In a first-floor room at the back, master, journeymen, and appren- 
tices working together made the articles which were sold by the 
master or the master's wife and daughter in the room in front. 
The manufacturer and merchant were one. Apprentices were 
bound to a master for a term of years (R. 99), often paying for the 
training and education to be received, and the master boarded and 
lodged both the apprentices and the paid workmen in the family 
rooms above the shop and store. 

The form of apprenticeship education and training which thus 
developed, from an educational point of view, forms for us the 
important feature of the history of these craft guilds. With the 
subdivision of labor and the development of new trades the craft- 
guild idea was extended to the new occupations, and a steady 
stream of rural labor flowing to the towns was absorbed by them 
and taught the elements of social usages, self-government, and 

1 As a rule a master craftsman might teach his trade to all his sons, but could 
have only one other apprentice who received board, lodging, clothing, and training, 
as one of the family. The guild still supervised the apprentice, protecting him from 
bad usage or defective training by the master. 

2 This required the production of a " masterpiece." This piece of work had to be 
produced to prove high competency. For example, in the shoemakers' guild of 
Paris, a pair of boots, three pairs of shoes, and a pair of slippers, all done in the best 
possible manner, were required. 

* Of thirty- three guilds investigated by Leach, all maintained song schools, and 
twenty-eight maintained a grammar school as well. In London, Merchant Taylors' 
School, Stationers' School, and the Mercers' School are present-day survivals of 
these ancient guild foundations. 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 211 

the mastery of a trade. Throughout all the long period up to the 
nineteenth century this apprenticeship education in a trade and 
in self-government constituted almost the entire formal educa- 
tion the worker with his hands received. The sons of the bar- 
barian invaders, as well as their knightly brothers, at last were 
busy learning the great lessons of industry, cooperation, and per- 
sonal loyalty. Here begins, for western Europe, " the nobility of 
labor — the long pedigree of toil." So well in fact did this appren- 
tice system of training and education meet the needs of the time 
that it persisted, as was said above, well into the nineteenth 
century (Rs. 200, 201, 242, 243), being displaced only by modem 
power machinery and systematized factory methods. During 
the later Middle Ages and in modem times it rendered an impor- 
tant educational service; in the later nineteenth century it became 
such an obstacle to educational and industrial progress that it has 
had to be supplemented or replaced by systematic vocational 
education. 

Influence of these new movements. We thus see, by the end 
of the twelfth century, a number of new influences in western 
Europe which point to an intellectual awakening and to the rise 
of a new educated class, separate from the monks and clergy on 
the one hand or the nobility on the other, and to the awakening 
of Europe to a new attitude toward life. Saracen learning, filter- 
ing across from Spain, had added materially to the knowledge 
Europe previously had, and had stimulated new intellectual inter- 
ests. Scholasticism had begun its great work of reorganizing and 
systematizing theology, which was destined to free philosophy, 
hitherto regarded as a dangerous foe or a suspected ally, from 
theology and to remake entirely the teaching of the subject. 
Civil and canon law had been created as wholly new professional 
subjects, and the beginnings of the teaching of medicine had been 
made. Instead of the old Seven Liberal Arts and a very limited 
course of professional study for the clerical ofhce being the entire 
curriculum, and Theology the one professional subject, we now 
find, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, a number of new 
and important professional subjects of large future significance — 
subjects destined to break the monopoly of theological study and 
put an end to logistic hair-splitting. The next step in the history 
of education came in the development of institutions where think- 
ing and teaching could be carried on free from civil or ecclesiastical 
control, with the consequent rise of an independent leained class 



212 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

in western Europe. This came with the rise of the universities, 
to which we next turn, and out of which in time arose the future 
independent scholarship of Europe, America, and the world in 
general. 

We also discover a series of new movements, connected with 
the Crusades, the rise of cities, and the revival of trade and indus- 
try, all of which clearly mark the close of the dark period of the 
Middle Ages. We note, too, the evolution of new social classes 
— a new Estate — destined in time to eclipse in importance both 
priest and noble and to become for long the ruling classes of the 
modem world. We also note the beginnings of an important 
independent system of education for the hand-workers which 
sufficed until the days of steam, machinery, and the evolution of 
the factory system. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were 
turning-points of great significance in the history of our western 
civilization, and with the opening of the wonderful thirteenth 
century the western world is well headed toward a new life and 
modem ways of thinking. 



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

Why is it that a strong religious control is never favorable to originality 
in thinking? 

Show how the work of the Nestorian Christians for the Mohammedan 
faith was another example of the Hellenization of the ancient world. 
Would it be possible for any people anywhere in the world to-day to 
make such advances as were made at Bagdad, in the late eighth and early 
ninth centuries, without such work permanently influencing the course 
of civilization and learning everywhere? To what is the difference due? 
What were the chief obstacles to Europe adopting at once the karning 
from Mohammedan Spain, instead of waiting centuries to discover this 
learning independently? 

Why did Aristotle's work seem of much greater value to the medijeval 
scholar than the Moslem science? What are the relative values to-day? 
Why should the light literature of Spain be spoken of as a gay contagion? 
Did this Christian attitude toward fiction and poetry continue long? 
In what ways was the Sic et Non of Abelard a complete break with medi- 
aeval traditions? 

How did the fact that Dialectic (Logic) now became the great subject 
of study in itself denote a marked intellectual advance? What was the 
significance of the prominence of this study for the future of thinking? 
What was the effect on inquiry and individual thinking of the method 
of presentation used by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica? 
How do you explain the all-absorbing interest in scholasticism during 
the greater part of a century? 

State the significance, for the future, of the revival of the study of Roman 
law: (a) intellectually; {b) in shaping future civilization. 
How do you explain the Christian attitude toward disease, and the 



INFLUENCES TOWARD A REVIVAL 213 

scientific treatment of it? Has that attitude entirely passed away? 
Illustrate. 

13. Why was it such a good thing for the future of civilization in England 
and France that so many of its nobility perished in the Crusades? 

14. State a number of ways in which the Crusade movements had a beneficial 
effect on western Europe. 

15. Show how the revival of commerce was an educative and a civilizing 
influence of large importance. 

16. Would the organization of commerce and banking, and the establishment 
of the sanctity of obligations in a country, be one important measure of 
the civihzalion to which that country had attained? Illustrate. 

17. Show how the development of industry and commerce and the accumu- 
lation of wealth tend to promote order and security, and to extend educa- 
tional advantages. 

18. Contrast a mediaeval guild and a modern labor union. A guild and a 
modern fraternal and benevolent society. 

ig. Why did apprenticeship education continue so long with so little change, 

when it is now so rapidly being superseded? 
20. Does the rise of a new Estate in society indicate a period of slow or rapid 

change? Why is such an evolution of importance for education and 

civilization? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

85. Draper: The Moslem Civilization in Spain. 

86. Draper: Learning among the Moslems in Spain. 

87. Norton: Works of Aristotle known by 1300. 

88. Averroes: On Aristotle's Greatness. 

89. Roger Bacon: How Aristotle was received at Oxford. 

90. Statutes: How Aristotle was received at Paris. 

(a) Decree of Church Council, 12 10 a.d. 
{b) Statutes of Papal Legate, 121 5 a.d. 
(c) Statutes of Pope Gregory, 1231 a.d. 
{d) Statutes of the Masters of Arts, 1254 A.D. 

91. Cousin: Abelard's ^/c d A^oH. 

(a) From the Introduction. 

ib) Types of Questions raised for Debate. 

92. Rashdall: The Great Work of the Schoolmen. 

93. Justinian: Preface to the Justinian Code. 

94. Giry and Reville: The Early Mediaeval Town. 

(0) To the Eleventh Century. 
{h) By the Thirteenth Century. 

95. Gross: An English Town Charter. 

96. London: Oath of a New Freeman in a Mediaeval Town. 

97. Riley: Ordinances of the White-Tawyers' Guild. 

98. State Report: School of the Guild of Saint Nicholas. 

99. England, 1396: A Mediaeval Indenture of Apprenticeship. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Contrast the state of civilization in Spain and the rest of Europe about 
1 100 (85, 86). 

2. Considering Aristotle's great intellectual worth (88) and work (87), is it 
to be wondered that the mediaevals regarded him with such reverence? 



214 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

3. Do we to-day accept Abelard's premise (91 a) as to attaining wisdom? 
Would his questions (91 b) excite much interest to-day? 

4. How do you explain the change in attitude toward him shown by the 
successive statutes enacted (90 a-d) for the University of Paris? 

5. Would the extract from Roger Bacon (89) lead you to think him a man 
ahead of the times in which he lived? Why? 

6. Did scholasticism represent the innocent intellectual activity, from the 
Church point of view, pictured by Rashdall (92)? 

7. What were the main things Justinian hoped to accomplish by the prepa- 
ration of the great Code, as set forth in the Preface (93)? 

8. Characterize the mediaeval town by the eleventh century (94 a). What 
was the nature of the progress from that time to the thirteenth century 
(94b)? 

9. What were the chief privileges contained in the town charter of Walling- 
ford (95), and what position does it indicate was held by the guild- 
merchant therein? 

10. What does the oath of a freeman (96) indicate as to social conditions? 

11. State the chief regulations imposed on its members by the White- 
Tawyers' Guild (97). Compare these regulations with those of a modern 
labor union, such as the plumbers. With a fraternal order, such as the 
Masons. 

12. What is indicated as to the educational advantages provided by the 
Guild of Saint Nicholas, in the city of Worcester, by the extract (98) 
taken from the Report of the King's Commissioner? 

13. Does a comparison of Readings 99, 201, and 242 indicate a static con- 
dition of apprenticeship education for centuries? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. 

Ameer, Ali. A Short History of the Saracens. 
*Ashley, W. J. Introduction to English Economic History. 

Cutts, Edw. L. Scents and Characters of the Middle Ages. 
*Gautier, Leon. Chivalry. 
*Giry, A., and Reville, A. Emancipation of the Mediceval Towns. 

Hibbert, F. A. Influence and Development of English Guilds. 
*Hume, M. A. S. The Spanish People. 
*Lavisse, Ernest. Mediceval Commerce and Industry. 
*MacCabe, Jos. Peter Abelard. 
*Munro, D. C, and Sellery, G. E. Mediceval Civilization. 

Poole, R. L. Illustrations of Mediceval Thought. 
*Rashdall, H. Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. I. 

Routledge, R. Popular History of Science. 

Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. 

Scott, J. F. Historical Essays on Apprenticeship and Vocational Educo 

tion. (England.) 
*Sedgwick, W. J., and Tyler, H. W. A Short History of Science. 

Taylor, H. C. The Mediceval Mind. 

Thorndike, Lynn. History of Mediaeval Europe. 

Townsend, W. J. The Great Schoolmen of the Middle Ages. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 

Evolution of the Studium Generale. In the preceding chapter 
we described briefly the new movement toward association 
which characterized the eleventh and the twelfth centuries — the 
municipal movement, the merchant guilds, the trade guilds, etc. 
These were doing for civil life what monasticism had earlier done 
for the religious life. They were collections of like-minded men, 
who united themselves into associations or guilds for mutual 
benefit, protection, advancement, and self-government within the 
limits of their city, business, trade, or occupation. This tendency 
toward association, in the days when state government was weak 
or in its infancy, was one of the marked features of the transition 
time from the early period of the Middle Ages, when the Church 
was virtually the State, to the later period of the Middle Ages, 
when the authority of the Church in secular matters was begin- 
ning to weaken, modem nations were beginning to form, and an 
interest in worldly affairs was beginning to replace the previous 
inordinate interest in the world to come. 

We also noted in the preceding chapters that certain cathedral 
and monastery schools, but especially the cathedral schools,' 
stimulated by the new interest in Dialectic, were developing into 
much more than local teaching institutions designed to afford a 
supply of priests of some little education for the parishes of the 
bishopric. Once York and later Canterbury, in England, had 
had teachers who attracted students from other bishoprics. Paris 
had for long been a famous center for the study of the Liberal 
Arts and of Theology. Saint Gall had become noted for its music. 
Theologians coming from Paris (1167-68) had given a new im- 
petus to study among the monks at Oxford. A series of political 
events in northern Italy had given emphasis to the study of law 
in many cities, and the Moslems in Spain had stimulated the 
schools there and in southern France to a study of medicine and 
Aristotelian science. Rome was for long a noted center for study. 
Gradually these places came to be known as studia publica, or 
studia generalia, meaning by this a generally recognized place of 

^ By the twelfth century the cathedral schools had passed the monastic schools in 
importance, and had obtained a lead which they were ever after to retain (R. 71). 



2i6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

study, where lectures were open to any one, to students of all 
countries and of all conditions.^ Traveling students came to 
these places from afar to hear some noted teacher read and com- 
ment on the famous textbooks of the time. 

From the first both teachers and students had been considered 
as members of the clergy, and hence had enjoyed the privileges 
and immunities extended to that class, but, now that the students 
were becoming so numerous and were traveling so far, some 
additional grant of protection was felt to be desirable. Accord- 
ingly the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa,- in 1 158, issued a general 
proclamation of privileges and protection (R. loi). In this he 
ordered that teachers and students traveling "to the places in 
which the studies are carried on " should be protected from unjust 
arrest, should be permitted to "dwell in security," and in case of 
suit should be tried ''before their professors or the bishop of the 
city," This document marks the beginning of a long series of 
rights and privileges granted to the teachers and students of the 
universities now in process of evolution in western Europe. 

The university evolution. The development of a university 
out of a cathedral or some other form of school represented, in 
the Middle Ages, a long local evolution. Universities were not 
founded then as they are to-day. A teacher of some reputation 
drew around him a constantly increasing body of students. 
Other teachers of abihty, finding a student body already there, 
also "set up their chairs" and began to teach. Other teachers 
and more students came. In this way a studium was created. 
About these teachers in time collected other university servants 
— "bedells, librarians, lower officials, preparers of parchment, 
scribes, illuminators of parchment, and others who serve it," as 
Count Rupert enumerated them in the Charter of Foundation 
granted, in 1386, to Heidelberg (R. 103). At Salerno, as we have 
already seen (p. 199), medical instruction arose around the work 
of Constantine of Carthage and the medicinal springs found in 
the vicinity. Students journeyed there from many lands, and 
licenses to practice the medical art were granted there as early 
as 1 137. At Bologna, we have also seen (p. 195), the work of 
Imerius and Gratian early made this a great center for the study 
of civil and canon law, and their pupils spread the taste for these 

1 As contrasted with the monasteries, which were under a "Rule." The oppor- 
tunities offered by such open institutions in the Middle Ages can hardly be over- 
estimated. 

^ Frederick I, of the mediaeval Holy Roman Empire of Germany and Italy. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 217 

new subjects throughout Europe. Paris for two centuries had 
been a center for the study of the Arts and of Theology, and a 
succession of famous teachers — William of Champeaux, Abelard, 
Peter the Lombard — had taught there. So important was the 
theological teaching there that Paris has been termed ' ' the Sinai 
of instruction" of the Middle Ages. 

By the beginning of the thirteenth century both students and 
teachers had become so numerous, at a number of places in west- 
em Europe, that they began to adopt the favorite mediaeval prac- 
tice and organized themselves into associations, or guilds, for 
further protection from extortion and oppression and for greater 
freedom from regulation by the Church. They now sought and 
obtained additional privileges for themselves, and, in particular, 
the great mediaeval document — a charter of rights and privileges.^ 
As both teachers and students were for long regarded as clerici 
the charters were usually sought from the Pope, but in some 
cases they were obtained from the king.^ These associations of 
scholars, or teachers, or both, " bom of the need of companionship 
which men who cultivate their intelligence feel," sought to per- 
form the same functions for those who studied and taught that 
the merchant and craft guilds were performing for their members. 
The ruling idea was association for protection, and to secure free- 
dom for discussion and study; the obtaining of corporate rights 
and responsibilities ; and the organization of a system of appren- 
ticeship, based on study and developing through journeyman into 
mastership,^ as attested by an examination and the license to 
teach. In the rise of these teacher and student guilds ^ we have 
the beginnings of the universities of western Europe, and their 
organization into chartered teaching groups (R. 100) was simply 

^ "No individual during the Middle Ages was secure in his rights, even of life 
or property, certainly not in the enjoyment of ordinary freedom, unless protected 
by specific guarantees secured from some organization. Politically, one must owe 
allegiance to some feudal lord from whom protection was received; economically, 
one must secure his rights through merchant or craft guild; intellectual interests 
and educational activities were secured and controlled bythe Church." (Monroe, 
P., Text Book in the History of Education, p. 317.) 

^ At first the older institutions organized themselves without charter, securing 
this later, while the institutions founded after 1300 usually began with a charter 
from pope or king, and sometimes from both (R. 100). 

* The degree of master was originally the license to practice the teaching trade, 
and analogous to a master shoemaker, goldsmith, or other master craftsmen. 

* "The universities, then, at their origins, were merely academic associations, 
analogous, as societies of mutual guaranty, to the corporations of working men, the 
commercial leagues, the trade-guilds which were playing so great a part at the same 
epoch; analogous also, by the privileges granted to them, to the municipal associa- 
tions and political communities that date from the same t\rt&-" (Compayre, G., 
Abelard aiid the Rise of the Universities, p. ^^.) 



^i8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION % 

another phase of that great movement toward the association of 
like-minded men for worldly purposes which began to sweep over 
the rising cities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.^ 

The term universitas, or university, which came in time to be 
applied to these associations of masters and apprentices in study, 
was a general Roman legal term, practically equivalent to our 
modern word corporation. At first it was applied to any associa- 
tion, and when used with reference to teachers and scholars was 
so stated. Thus, in addressing the masters and students at Paris, 
Pope Innocent, in 1205, writes: " Universis magistris et scholaribus 
Parisiensibus''; that is, "to the corporation of masters and schol- 
ars at Paris." Later the term university became restricted to the 
meaning which we give it to-day. 

The university mothers. Though this movement for associa- 
tion and the development of advanced study had manifested itself 
in a number of places by the close of the twelfth century, two 
places in particular led all the others and became types which were 
followed in charters and in new creations. These were Bologna 
and Paris. ^ After one or the other of these two nearly all the 
universities of western Europe were modeled. Bologna or Paris, 
or one of their immediate children, served as a pattern. Thus 
Bologna was the university mother for almost all the Italian uni- 
versities; for Montpellier and Grenoble in southern France; for 
some of the Spanish universities; and for Glasgow, Upsala, Cra- 
cow, and for the Law Faculty at Oxford. Paris was the univer- 
sity mother for Oxford, and through her Cambridge; for most of 
the northern French universities; for the university of Toulouse, 
which in turn became the mother for other southern French 
and northern Spanish universities; for Lisbon and Coimbra in 
Portugal; for the early German universities at Prague, Vienna, 
Cologne, and Heidelberg; and through Cologne for Copenhagen. 
Through one of the colleges at Cambridge — Emmanuel — she 
became, indirectly, the mother of a new Cambridge in America 
■ — Harvard — founded in 1636. Figure 61 shows the location of 
the chief universities founded before 1600. Viewed from the 
standpoint of instruction, Paris was followed almost entirely in 
Theology, and Bologna in Law, while the three centers which 

1 "M. Bimbenet, in his History of the University of Orleans (Paris, 1853) repro- 
duces several articles from the statutes of the guilds, the provisions of which are 
identical with those contained in the statutes of the universities." {Ibid., p. 35.) 

^ Bologna and Paris were the great "master" universities of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, while those founded on a model of either were more in the nature of "journey- 
men" institutions. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 



219 



most influenced the development of instruction in medicine were 
Salerno, Montpellier, and Salamanca. 

While the earlier universities gradually arose as the result of a 
long local evolution, it in time became common for others to be 




Fig. 61. Showing Location of the Chief Universities founded 
BEFORE 1600 

founded by a migration of professors from an older university to 
some cathedral city having a developing studium. In the days 
when a university consisted chiefly of master and students, when 
lectures could be held in any kind of a building or collection of 
buildings, and when there were no libraries, laboratories, campus, 
or other university property to tie down an institution, it was easy 
to migrate. Thus, in 1209, the school at Cambridge was created 
a university by a secession of masters from Oxford, much as bees 
swarm from a hive. Sienna, Padua, Reggio, Vicenza, Arezzo 
resulted from "swarmings" from Bologna; and Vercelli from 
Vicenza. In 1228, after a student riot at Paris which provoked 



220 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

reprisals from the city, many of the masters and students went to 
the studium towns of Angers, Orleans, and Rheims, and univer- 
sities were established at the first two. Migrations from Prague 
helped establish many of the German universities. In this way 
the university organization was spread over Europe. In 1200 
there were but six studia generalia which can be considered as 
having evolved into universities — Salerno, Bologna, and Reggio, 
in Ital)", Paris and Montpellier, in France; and Oxford, in Eng- 
land. By 1300 eight more had evolved in Italy, three more in 
France, Cambridge in England, and five in Spain and Portugal. 
By 1400 twenty-two additional universities had developed, five 
of which were in German lands, and by 1500 thirty-five more had 
been founded, making a total of eighty. By 1600 the total had 
been raised to one hundred and eight (R. 100, for list by countries, 
dates, and method of founding). Some of these (approximately 
thirty) afterwards died, while in the following centuries additional 
ones were created.^ 

Privileges and immunities granted. The grant of privileges 
to physicians and teachers made by the Emperor Constantine, 
in 333 A.D. (R. 26), and the privileges and immunities granted to 
the clergy (clerici) by the early Christian Roman Emperors 
(R. 38), doubtless formed a basis for the many grants of special 
privileges made to the professors and students in the early univer- 
sities. The document promulgated by Frederick Barbarossa, in 
1158 (R. loi), began the granting of privileges to the studia 
generalia, and this was followed by numerous other grants. The 
grant to students of freedom from trial by the city authorities, 
and the obligation of every citizen of Paris to seize any one seen 
striking a student, granted by Philip Augustus, in 1200 (R. 102), 
is another example, widely followed, of the bestowal of large 
privileges. Count Rupert I, in founding the University of Heidel- 
berg, in 1386, granted many privileges, exempted the students 
from "any duty, levy, imposts, tolls, excises, or other exactions 
whatever" while coming to, studying at, or returning home from 
the university (R. 103). The exemption from taxation (R. 104) 
became a matter of form, and was afterwards followed in the 

1 Between 1600 and 1700, although most of the cities capable of supporting uni- 
versities were provided with them, twenty-one more were created, chiefly in Ger- 
many and Holland. The first American university (Hars'ard) was established in 
1636, and the second (Yale) in 1702. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 
without counting the United States or any western-hemisphere country, forty more 
were created. Among the important nineteenth-century creations were Berlin, 1810; 
Christiana, 181 1; St. Petersburg, 1819; Brussels, 1834; London, 1836; and Athens, 
1836. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 221 

chartering of American colleges (R. 187), Exemption from mili- 
tary service also was granted. 

So valuable an asset was a university to a city, and so easy was 
it for a university to move almost overnight, that cities often, 
and at times even nations, encouraged not only the founding of 
universities, but also the migration of both faculties and students. 
An interesting case of a city bidding for the presence of a univer- 
sity is that of Vercelli (R. 105), which made a binding agreement, 
as a part of the city charter, whereby the city agreed with a body 
of masters and students "swarming" from Padua to loan the 
students money at lower than the regular rates, to see that there 
was plenty of food in the markets at no increase in prices, and to 
protect the students from injustice. An instance of bidding by a 
State is the case of Cambridge, which obtained quite an addition 
by the coming of striking Paris masters and students in 1229, in 
response to the pledge of King Henry III (R. 109), who "humbly 
sympathized with them for their sufferings at Paris," and prom- 
ised them that if they would come " to our kingdom of England 
and remain there to study" he would assign to them "cities, 
boroughs, towns, whatsoever you may wish to select, and in 
every fitting way will cause you to rejoice in a state of liberty 
and tranquillity." 

One of the most important privileges which the universities 
early obtained, and a rather singular one at that, was the right of 
cessatio, which meant the right to stop lectures and go on a strike 
as a means of enforcing a redress of grievances against either town 
or church authority (R. 107). This right was for long jealously 
guarded by the university, and frequently used to defend itself 
from the smallest encroachments on its freedom to teach, study, 
and discipline the members of its guild as it saw fit, and often the 
right not to discipline them at all. Often the cessatio was invoked 
on very trivial grounds, as in the case of the Oxford cessatio of 
1209 (R. 108), the Paris cessatio of 1229 (R. 109), and the numer- 
ous other cessationes which for two centuries ^ repeatedly disturbed 
the continuity of instruction at Paris. 

Degrees in the guild. The most important of the university 
rights, however, was the right to examine and license its own 
teachers (R. no), and to grant the license to teach (Rs. in, 112). 
Founded as the universities were after the guild model, they were 
primarily places for the taking of apprentices in the Arts, devel- 

^ See Compayre. G., Abelard, pp. 87-00 for list of these "strikes." 



222 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

oping them into journeymen and masters, and certifying to their 
proficiency in the teaching craft.' Their purpose at first was to 
prepare teachers, and the giving of instruction to students for 
cultural ends, or a professional training for practical use aside 
from teaching the subject, was a later development. 

Accordingly it came about in time that, after a number of years 
of study in the Arts under some master, a student was permitted 
to present himself for a test as to his ability to define words, 
determine the meaning of phrases, and read the ordinary Latin 
texts in Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic (the Trivium), to the satis- 
faction of other masters than his own. In England this test came 
to be known by the term determine. Its passage was equivalent 
to advancing from apprenticeship to the ranks of a journeyman, 
and the successful candidate might now be permitted to assist the 
master, or even give some elementary instruction himself while 
continuing his studies. He now became an assistant or compan- 
ion, and by the fourteenth century was known as a baccalaureus, 
a term used in the Church, in chivalry, and in the guilds, and 
which meant a beginner. There was at first, though, no thought 
of establishing an examination and a new degree for the comple- 
tion of this first step in studies. The bachelor's degree was a 
later development, sought at first by those not intending to 
teach, and eventually erected into a separate degree. 

When the student had finally heard a sufficient number of 
courses, as required by the statutes of his guild, he might present 
himself for examination for the teaching license. This was a 
public trial, and took the form of a public disputation on some 
stated thesis, in the presence of the masters, and against all 
comers. It was the student's "masterpiece," analogous to the 
masterpiece of any other guild, and he submitted it to a jury of 
the masters of his craft. ^ Upon his masterpiece being adjudged 

^ "It is impossible to fix the period at which the system of degrees began to be 
organized. Things were done slowly. At the outset, and until towards the end 
of the twelfth century, there existed nothing resembling a real conferring of degrees 
in the rising universities. In order to teach it was necessary to have a respondent, 
a master authorized by age and knowledge. . . . 

"The 'license to teach,' nevertheless, became by slow degrees, as master and 
pupils multiplied, a j)rcliminary condition of teaching, a sort of diploma more and 
more requisite, and of which the bishops (or their representatives, the chancellors) 
were the dispensers. Up to the fourteenth century there was hardly any other 
clearly-defined university title." (Compayre, (1., Abrlard, pp. 142-43.) 

^ "It is manifest that the universities borrowed from the industrial corporations 
their 'companionships,' their 'masterships,' and even their banquets; a great 
repast being the ordinary sequel of the reception of the baccalaureate or doctoraie." 
(Compayr6, G., Abelard, p. 141.) 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 223 




Fig. 62. Seal of a 

Doctor, University 

OF Paris 



satisfactory, he also became a master in his craft, was now able 

to define and dispute, was formally admitted to the highest rank 

in the teaching guild, might have a seal, and 

was variously known as master, doctor, or 

professor, all of which were once synonymous 

terms. 1 If he wished to prepare himself for 

teaching one of the professional subjects he 

studied still further, usually for a number of 

years, in one of the professional faculties, and 

in time he was declared to be a Doctor of 

Law, or Medicine, or of Theology. 

The teaching faculties. The students for 
a long time grouped themselves for better 
protection (and aggression) according to the 
nation from which they came,- and each 
"nation" elected a councilor to look after 
the interests of its members. Between the 
different nations there were constant quarrels, insults were 
passed back and forth, and much bad blood engendered.^ On 
the side of the masters the organization was by teaching subjects, 

^ The term professor has Vjecome general in its significance, and is used in all 
countries. In England the term master was retained for the higher degree, while 
in Germany the term doctor was retained, and the doctorate made their one degree. 
America followed the English plan in the estiblishment of the early colleges, and 
the degree of A.B. and A.M. were provided for. Later, when the German univer- 
sity influence became prominent in the United States, the doctor's degree was super- 
imposed on the English plan. 

* At Paris, for example, there were four nations — France, Picardy, Normandy, 
and England. These were again divided into tribes, as for example, there were 
fi%'e tribes of the French — Paris, Sens, Rheims, Tours, and Bourges. Orleans had 
ten nations — France, Germany, Lorraine, Burgundy, Champagne, Picardy, Nor- 
mandy, Touraine, Guyenne, and Scotland. In those days these represented sepa- 
rate nationalities, who little understood one another, and carried their constant 
quarrels up to the ver>' lecture benches of the professors. 

' A contemporary writer. Jacobus de Vitriaco, has left us an account of student 
life at Paris, in which he says: 

"The students at Paris wrangled and disputed not merely about the various sects 
or about some discussions; but the differences between the countries also caused 
dissensions, hatreds and virulent animosities among them, and they impudently 
uttered all kinds of affronts and insults against one another. 

"They affirmed that the English were drunkards and had tails; the sons of France 
proud, effeminate and carefully adorned like women. They said that the Germans 
were furious and obscene at their feasts; the Normans vain and boastful; the 
Poitevins traitors and always adventurers. The Burgundians they considered 
vulgar and stupid. The Bretons were reputed to be fickle and changeable, and 
were often reproached for the death of Arthur. The Lombards were called avari- 
cious, vicious and cowardly; the Romans, seditious, turbulent and slanderous; the 
Sicilians, tyrannical and cruel; the inhabitants of Brabant, men of blood, incendia- 
ries, brigands and ravishers; the Flemish, fickle, prodigal, gluttonous, >ielding as 
butter, and slothful. After such insults from words they often came to blows." 
vPa. Trans, and Repts. from Sources, vol. ii, no. 3, pp. 19-20.) 



224 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



and into what came to be known SiS faculties } Thus there came 
to be four faculties in a fully organized mediaeval university, 
representing the four great divisions of knowledge which had been 
evolved — Arts, Law, Medicine, and Theology. Each faculty 
elected a dean, and the deans and councilors elected a rector, who 
was the head or president of the university. The chancellor, the 
successor of the cathedral school scholasticus , was usually ap- 
pointed by the Pope and represented the Church, and a long 
struggle ensued between the rector and the chancellor to see who 
should be the chief authority in the university. The rector was 
ultimately victorious, and the position of chancellor became 
largely an honorary position of no real importance. 

The Arts Faculty was the successor of the old cathedral-school 
instruction in the Seven Liberal Arts, and was found in practically 

all the universities. 
The Law Faculty em- 
braced civil and canon 
law, as worked out at 
Bologna. The Med- 
ical Faculty taught 
the knowledge of the 
medical art, as worked 
out at Salerno and 
Montpellier. The The- 
ological Faculty, the 
most important of the 
four, prepared learned 
men for the service of 
the Church, and was 
for some two cen- 
turies controlled by 
the scholastics. The 
Arts Faculty was pre- 
paratory to the other 
three. As Latin was the language of the classroom, and all the 
texts were Latin texts, a reading and speaking knowledge of 
Latin was necessary before coming to the university to study. 
This was obtained from a study of the first of the Seven Arts 
— Grammar — in some monastery, cathedral, or other type of 

^ In an American university the term college or school has largely replaced the 
term f acidly; in Europe the term faculty is still used. Thus we say College of Lib 
eral Arts, or School of Law, instead of Facidty of Arts, etc. 




Fig. 63. New College, at Oxford 

One of the oldest of the Oxford colleges, having been 
founded in 1379. The picture shows the chapel, clois- 
ters (consecrated in 1400), and a tall tower, once 
forming a part of the Oxford city walls. Note the 
similarity of this early college to a monastery, as in 
Plate I. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 225 

school. Thus a knowledge of Latin formed practically the soler' 
requirement for admission to the mediseval university, and con- 
tinued to be the chief admission requirement in our universities 
up to the nineteenth century (R. 186 a). In Europe it is still of 
great importance as a preparatory subject, but in South American 
countries it is not required at all. 

Very few of the universities, in the beginning, had all four of 
these faculties. The very nature of the evolution of the earlier 
ones precluded this. Thus Bologna had developed into a studium 
generale from its prominence in law, and was virtually constituted 
a university in 11 58, but it did not add Medicine until 13 16, or 
Theology until 1360. Paris began sometime before 1200 as an 
arts school, Theology with some instruction in Canon Law was 
added by 1208, a Law Faculty in 1271, and a Medical Faculty in 
1274. MontpelHer began as a medical school sometime in the 
twelfth century. Law followed a little later, a teacher from 
Bologna "setting up his chair" there. Arts was organized by 
1242. A sort of theological school began in 1263, but it was not 
chartered as a faculty until 142 1. So it was with many of the 
early universities. These four traditional faculties were well 
established by the fourteenth century, and continued as the 
typical form of university organization until modem times. With 
the great university development and the great multiplication of 
subjects of study which characterized the nineteenth century, 
many new faculties and schools and colleges have had to be 
created, particularly in the United States, in response to new 
modem demands.^ 

Nature of the instruction. The teaching material in each fac- 
ulty was much as we have already indicated. After the recovery 
of the works of Aristotle he came to dominate the instruction in 
the Faculty of Arts.- The Statutes of Paris, in 1254, giving the 

^ For example, one of our modern state universities is organized into the following 
faculties, schools, and colleges: (i) college of liberal arts; (2) school of medicine; 
(3) school of law; (4) school of fine arts; (5) school of pure science; (6) college of 
engineering; (7) college of agriculture; (,8) school of history, economics, and social 
sciences; (9) school of business administration; (10) college of education; (11) school 
of household arts; (12) school of pharmacy; (13) school of veterinary medicine; 
(14) school of library science; (15) school of forestry; (16) school of sanitary engineer- 
ing; (17) the graduate school; and (18) the university-extension division. 

2 "He was called 'The Philosopher'; and so fully were scholars convinced that it 
had pleased God to permit Aristotle to say the last word upon each and every branch 
of knowledge that they humbly accepted him, along with the Bible, the church 
fathers, and the canon and Roman law, as one of the unquestioned authorities which 
together formed a complete guide for humanity in conduct and in every branch of 
science." (Robinson, J. H., History of Western Europe, p. 272.) 



226 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

books to be read for the A.B. and the A.M. degrees (R. 113), show 
how fully Aristotle had been adopted there as the basis for instruc- 
tion in Logic, Ethics, and Natural Philosophy by that time. The 
books required for these two degrees at Leipzig, in 1410 (R. 114), 
show a much better-balanced course of instruction, though the 
time requirements given for each subject show how largely Aris- 
totle predominated there also. Oxford (R. 115) kept up better 
the traditions of the earlier Seven Liberal Arts in its requirements, 
and classified the new works of Aristotle in three additional 
"philosophies" — natural, moral, and metaphysical. From four 
to seven years were required to complete the arts course, though 
the tendency was to reduce the length of the arts course as secon- 
dary schools below the university were evolved.^ 

In the Law Faculty, after Theology the largest and most im- 
portant of all the faculties in the mediaeval university, the Corpus 
Juris Civilis of Justinian (p. 195) and the Decretum of Gratian 
(p. 196) were the textbooks read, with perhaps a little more prac- 
tical work in discussion than in Arts or Medicine. The Oxford 
course of study in both Civil and Canon Law (R. 116 b-c) gives 
a good idea as to what was required for degrees in one of the best 
of the early law faculties. 

In the Medical Faculty a variety of books — translations of 
Hippocrates (p. 197), Galen (p. 198), Avicenna (p. 198), and the 
works of certain writers at Salerno and Jewish and Moslem writ- 
ers in Spain — were read and lectured on. The list of medical 
books used at Montpellier,- in 1340, which at that time was the 
foremost place for medical instruction in western Europe, shows 
the book-nature and the extent of the instruction given at the 
leading school of medicine of the time. It was, moreover, cus- 
tomary at Montpellier for the senior students to spend a summer 
in visiting the sick and doing practical work. We have here the 

1 This tendency increased with time, due both to the development of secondary 
schools which could give part of the preparation, and to the increasing number of 
students who came to the university for cultural or professional ends and without 
intending to pass the tests for the mastership and the license to teach. Finally 
the arts course was reduced to three or four years (the usual college course), and the 
master's degree to on;, and for the latter even residence was waived during the 
middle of the nineteenth century. The A.M. degree has recently been rehabiUtated 
and now usually signifies a year of hard study in English and American universities, 
though a few eastern American institutions still play with it or even grant it as an 
honorary degree. In Germany the arts course disappeared, being given to the 
secondary schools entirely in the late eighteenth century, and the universities now 
confer only the degree of doctor. 

^ For a list of the books used in the faculty of medicine at Montpellier, in 1340, 
see Rashdall, H., Universiiies of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol 11, pt. i, p. 123; pt. iij 
p. 780. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 



227 



merest beginnings of clinical instruction and hospital service, and 
at this stage medical instruction remained until quite modem 
times. The medical courses at Paris (R. 117) and Oxford (R. 
116 d) were less satisfactory, only book instruction being required. 







Fig. 64. A Lecture on Civil Law by Guillaume Benedicti 

(After a sixteenth-century wood engraving, now in the National Library, Paris, 

Cabinet of Designs) 



Both Law and Medicine were so dominated by the scholastic 
ideal and methods that neither accomplished what might have 
been possible in a freer atmosphere. 

In the Theological Faculty the Sentences of Peter Lombard 
(p. 189) and the Summa Theologia oi Thomas Aquinas (p. 191) 
were the textbooks used. The Bible was at first also used some- 
what, but later came to be largely overshadowed by the other 
books and by philosophical discussions and debates on all kinds 
of hair-splitting questions, kept carefully within the limits pre- 
scribed by the Church. The requirements at Oxford (R. 116 a) 
give the course of instruction in one of the best of the theological 
faculties of the time. The teachers were scholastics, and scho- 
lastic methods and ideals everywhere prevailed. Roger Bacon's 
(12 14-1294) criticism of this type of theological study (R. 118)^ 
which he calls "horse loads, not at all [in consonance] with the 
most holy text of God," and "philosophical, both in substance 
and method," gives an idea of the kind of instruction which came 



228 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



to prevail in the theological faculties under the dominance of the 
scholastic philosophers. 

Years of study were required in each of these three professional 
faculties, as is shown by the statement of requirements as given 
for MontpeHier, Paris (R. 117), and Oxford (R. 116 a). 

Methods of instruction. A very important reason why so 
long a period of study was required in each of the professional 
faculties, as well as in the Faculty of Arts, is to be found in the 
lack of textbooks and the methods of instruction followed. While 
the standard textbooks were becoming much more common, due 




Fig. 65. Library of the University of Leyden, in Holland 
(After an engraving by J. C. Woudanus, dated 1610) 
This shows well the chained books, and a common type of bookcase in use in 
monasteries, churches, and higher schools. Counting 35 books to the case, this 
shows a library of 35 volumes on mathematics; 70 volumes each on literature, 
philosophy, and medicine; 140 volumes of historical books; 175 volumes on civil 
and canon law; and 160 volumes on theology, or a total of 770 volumes — a good- 
sized library for the time. 

to much copying and the long-continued use of the same texts, 
they were still expensive and not owned by many.^ To provide 

1 After the latter part of the thirteenth century the book-writing and selling 
trade was organized as a guild industry, and the copying of texts for sale became 
pommoiu Tben^axose the practice of erasing as much of the writing from old books 




Plate 4. A Lecture on Theology by Albertus Magnus 

An illuminated picture in a manuscript of 13 10, now in the royal collection 
of copper engra\-ings, at Berlin. The master in his chair is here shown 
"reading" to his students. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 229 

a loan collection of theological books for poor students we find, 
in 1 27 1, a gift by will to the University of Paris (R. 119) of a pri- 
vate library, containing twenty-seven books. Even if the stu- 
dents possessed books, the master "read" ^ and commented from 
his "gloss" at great length on the texts being studied. Besides 
the mere text each teacher had a "gloss " or commentary for it — 
that is, a mass of explanatory notes, summaries, cross-references, 
opinions by others, and objections to the statements of the text. 
The "gloss" was a book in itself, often larger than the text, and 
these standard glosses,^ or commentaries, were used in the uni- 
versity instruction for centuries. In Theology and Canon Law 
they were particularly extensive. 

All instruction, too, was in Latin. The professor read from 
the Latin text and gloss, repeating as necessary, and to this the 
student listened. Sometimes he read so slowly that the text 
could be copied, but in 1355 this method was prohibited at Paris 
(R. 121), and students who tried to force the masters to follow it 
"by shouting or whistling or raising a din, or by throwing stones," 
were to be suspended for a year. The first step in the instruction 
was a minute and subtle analysis of the text itself, in which each 
line was dissected, analyzed, and paraphrased, and the comments 
on the text by various authors were set forth. Next all passages 
capable of two interpretations were thrown into the form of a 
question ; pro and contra, after the manner of Abelard. The argu- 
ments on each side were advanced, and the lecturer's conclusion 
set forth and defended. The text was thus worked over day after 
day in minute detail. Having as yet but little to teach, the mas- 
ters made the most of what they had. A good example of the 
mediaeval plan of university instruction is found in the announce- 
ment of Odofredus, a distinguished teacher of Law at Bologna, 
about the middle of the thirteenth century, which Rashdall thinks 

as could be done, and writing the new book crosswise of the page. In this way the 
expense for parchment was reduced, and in the process many valueless and a few 
valuable books were destroyed. Still, the cost for books during the days of parch- 
ment must have been high. Walsh estimates that "an ordinary folio volume prob- 
ably cost from 400 to 500 francs in our [1914] values, that is, between $80 and 
$100." 

^ In Germany the old mediaeval expression has been retained, and the announce- 
ments of instruction there still state that the professor will "read" on such and 
such subjects, instead of "of5er courses," as we say in the United States. 

^ Norton, in his Readings in the History of Education; Mediaval Universities, pp. 
S9~75. gives an extract from a text (Gratian) and "gloss" by various writers, on the 
question — "Shall Priests be Acquainted with Profane Literature, or No?" which 
see for a good example of mediaeval university instruction and the manner in which 
* small amount of knowledge was spun out by means of a gloss. 



230 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

is equally applicable to methods in other subjects. Odofredus 

says: 

First, I shall give you summaries of each title before I proceed to the 
text; secondly, I shall give you as clear and explicit a statement as I 
can of the purport of each Law (included in the title) ; thirdly, I shall 
read the text with a view to correcting it; fourthly, I shall briefly repeat 
the contents of the Law; fifthly, I shall solve apparent contradictions, 
adding any general principles of Law (to be extracted from the passage) , 
and any distinctions and subtle and useful problems arising out of the 
Law with their solutions, as far as the Divine Providence shall enable 
me. And if any Law shall seem deserving, by reason of its celebrity 
or difficulty, of a Repetition, I shall reserve it for an evening Repetition. 

It will be seen that both students and professors were bound to 
the text, as were the teachers of the Seven Liberal Arts in the 
cathedral schools before them. There was no appeal to the 
imagination, still less to observation, experiment, or experience. 
Each generation taught what it had learned, except that from 
time to time some thinker made a new organization, or some new 
body of knowledge was unearthed and added. 

Another method much used was the debate, or disputation, 
and participation in a number of these was required for degrees 
(R. ii6). These disputations were logical contests, not unlike a 
modem debate, in which the students took sides, cited authorities, 
and summarized arguments, all in Latin. Sometimes a student 
gave an exhibition in which he debated both sides of a question, 
and summarized the argument, after the manner of the professors. 
As a corrective to the memorization of lectures and texts, these 
disputations served a useful purpose in awakening intellectual 
vigor and logical keenness. They were very popular until intc 
the sixteenth century, when new subject-matter and new ways of 
thinking offered new opportunities for the exercise of the intellect. 

In teaching equipment there was almost nothing at first, and 
but little for centuries to come. Laboratories, workshops, gym- 
nasia, good buildings and classrooms — all alike were equally un- 
known. Time schedules of lectures (Rs. 122, 123) came in but 
slowly, in such matters each professor being a free lance. Nor 
were there any libraries at first, though in time these developed. 
For a long time books were both expensive and scarce (Rs. 78, 119, 
120). After the invention of printing (first book printed in 1456), 
university libraries increased rapidly and soon became the 
chief feature of the university equipment. Figure 65 shows the 
library of the University of Leyden, in Holland, thirty-five years 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 231 




Fig. 66. A University Disputation 
(From Fick's .4/// Deutschland's Hohen Schiden) 

after its foundation, and about one hundred and fifty years after 
the beginnings of printing. It shows a rather large increase in 
the size of book collections ^ after tlie introduction of printing, and 
a good library organization. 

^ Not many early library catalogues have been preserved, but those which have 
all show small libraries before the days of printing. At Oxford, where the univer- 
sity was broken up into colleges, each of which had it's own library, the following 
college libraries are known to have existed: Peterhouse College (1418), 304 volumes; 
Kings College (1453), 174 volumes; Queens College (1472), 199 volumes; University 
Library (1473), 330 volumes. The last two were just before the introduction of 
printing. 

The Peterhouse library (1418) was classified as follows: 

Subject Chained Loanable 

Theology 61 63 

Natural Philosophy 26 "J 

Moral Philosophy 5 J- 19 

Metaphysics 3 J 

Logic 5 15 

Grammar 6 \^ 

Poetry 4 ^ ^ 

Medicine 15 3 

Civil Law 9 20 

Canon Law 18 19 

Totals 152 152 

(Clarke, J. W., The Care of Books, pp. 145, 147.) 



232 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Value of the training given. Measured in terms of modem 
standards the instruction was undoubtedly poor, unnecessarily 
drawn out, and the educational value low. We could now teach 
as much information, and in a better manner, in but a fraction 
of the time then required. Viewed also by the standards of in- 
struction in the higher schools of Greece and Rome the conditions 
were almost equally bad. Viewed, though, from the standpoint 
of what had prevailed in western Europe during the dark period 




Fig. 67. a University Lecture and Lecture Room 
(From a woodcut printed at Strassburg, 1608) 



of the early Middle Ages, it represented a. marked advance in 
method and content — except in pure literature, where there was 
an undoubted decline due to the absorbing interest in Dialectic — 
and it particularly marked a new spirit, as nearly critical as the 
times would allow. Despite the heterogeneous and but partially 
civilized student body, youthful and but poorly prepared for 
study, the drunkenness and fighting, the lack of books and equip- 
ment, the large classes and the poor teaching methods, and the 
small amount of knowledge which fomied the grist for their mills 
and which they ground exceeding small, these new universities 
held within themselves, almost in embryo form, the largest prom- 
ise for the intellectual future of western Europe which had ap- 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 233 

peared since the days of the old universities of the Hellenic world 
(R. 124). In these new institutions knowledge was nat only 
preserved and transmitted, but was in time to be tremendously 
advanced and extended. They were the first organizations to 
break the monopoly of the Church in learning and teaching; they 
were the centers to which all new knowledge gravitated; under 
their shadow thousands of young men found intellectual compan- 
ionship and in their classrooms intellectual stimulation; and in 
encouraging "laborious subtlety, heroic industry, and intense 
application," even though on very limited subject-matter, and in 
training "men to think and work rather than to enjoy" (R. 124), 
they were preparing for the time when western Europe should 
awaken to the riches of Greece and Rome and to a new type of 
intellectual hfe of its own. From these beginnings the university 
organization has persisted and grown and expanded, and to-day 
stands, the Synagogue and the Catholic Church alone excepted, 
as the oldest organized institution of human society. 

The manifest tendency of the universities toward speculation, 
though for long within limits approved by the Church, was ulti- 
mately to awaken inquiry, investigation, rational thinking, and 
to bring forth the modem spirit. The preservation and transmis- 
sion of knowledge was by the university organization transferred 
from the monastery to the school, from monks to doctors, and 
from the Church to a body of logically trained men, only nomi- 
nally members of the clerici. Their successors would in time en- 
tirely break away from connections with either Church or State, 
and stand forth as the independent thinkers and scholars in the 
arts, sciences, professions, and even in Theology. University 
graduates in Medicine would in time wage a long struggle against 
bigotry to lay the foundations of modem medicine. Graduates 
in Law would contend with kings and feudal lords for larger 
privileges for the as yet lowly common man, and would help to 
usher in a period of greater political equality. The university 
schools of Theology were in time to send forth the keenest critics 
of the practices of the Church. Out of the university cloisters 
were to come the men — Dante, Petrarch, Wy cliff e, Huss, Luther, 
Calvin, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton — who were to usher in the 
modern spirit. 

The universities as a public force. Almost from the first the 
universities availed themselves of their privileges and proclaimed 
a bold independence. The freedom from arrest and trial by the 



234 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

civil authorities for petty offenses, or even for murder, and the 
right to go on a strike if in any way interfered with, were but 
beginnings in independence in an age when such independence 
seemed important. These rights were in time given up,^ and in 
their place the much more important rights of liberty to study as 
truth seemed to lead, freedom in teaching as the master saw the 
truth, and the right to express themselves as an institution on pub- 
lic questions which seemed to concern them, were slowly but defi- 
nitely taken on in place of the earlier privileges. Virtually a new 
type of members of society — a new Estate — was evolved, rank- 
ing with Church, State, and nobility, and this new Estate soon 
began to express itself in no uncertain tones on matters which 
concerned both Church and State. The universities were demo- 
cratic in organization and became democratic in spirit, represent- 
ing a heretofore unknown and unexpressed public opinion in 
western Europe. They did not wait to be asked; they gave their 
opinions unsolicited. "The authority of the University of Paris, " 
writes one contemporary, "has risen to such a height that it is 
necessary to satisfy it, no matter on what conditions." The uni- 
versity "wanted to meddle with the government of the Pope, the 
King, and everything else," writes another. We find Paris inter- 
vening repeatedly in both church and state affairs,^ and repre- 
senting French nationality before it had come into being, as 
the so-called Holy Roman Empire represented the Germans, and 
the Papacy represented the Italians. In Montpellier, professors 
of Law were considered as knights, and after twenty years of 
practice they became counts. In Bologna we find the professors 
of Law one of the three assemblies of the city. Oxford, Cam- 
bridge, Paris, and the Scottish universities were given represen- 
tation in Parliament. The German universities were from the 
first prominent in political affairs, and in the reformation struggle 
of the early sixteenth century they were the battle-grounds. 

In an age of oppression these university organizations stood for 
freedom. In an age of force they began the substitution of reason. 
In the centuries from the end of the Dark Ages to the Reformation 
they were the homes of free thought. They early assumed na- 
tional character and proclaimed a bold independence. Questions 

1 Survivals of these old privileges still exist in the German universities which 
exercise police jurisdiction over their students and have a university jail, and in the 
American college student's feeUng of having the right to create a disturbance in the 
town and break minor police regulations without being arrested and fined. 

2 See Compayre, G., Abelard, p. 2qi, for illustrations. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 235 

of State and Church they discussed with a freedom before un- 
known. They presented their grievances to both kings and popes, 
from both they obtained new privileges, to both they freely offered 
their advice, and sometimes both were forced to do their bidding. 
At times important questions of State, such as the divorce of 
Philip of France and that of Henry VHI of England, were sub- 
mitted to them for decision. They were not infrequently called 
upon to pass upon questions of doctrine or heresy. "Kings and 
princes," says Rashdall, in an excellent summary as to the value 
and influence of the mediaeval university instruction (R. 124), 
''found their statesmen and men of business in the universities, 
most often, no doubt, among those tramed in the practical science 
of Law." Talleyrand is said to have asserted that "their theo- 
logians made the best diplomats." For the first time since the 
downfall of Rome the administration of human affairs was now 
placed once more in the hands of educated men. By the inter- 
change of students from all lands and their hospitality, such as it 
was, to the stranger, the universities tended to break down bar- 
riers and to prepare Europe for larger intercourse and for more of 
a common life. 

On the masses of the people, of course, they had little or no 
influence, and could not have for centuries to come. Their great- 
est work, as has been the case with universities ever since their 
foundation, was that of drawing to their classrooms the brightest 
minds of the times, the most capable and the most industrious, 
and out of this young raw material training the leaders of the 
future in Church and State. Educationally, one of their most 
important services was in creating a surplus of teachers in the 
Arts who had to find a market for their abilities in the rising 
secondary schools. These developed rapidly after 1200, and to 
these we owe a somewhat more general diffusion of the little 
learning and the intellectual training of the time. In preparing 
future leaders for State and Church in law, theology, and teaching, 
the universities, though sometimes opposed and their opinions 
ignored, nevertheless contributed materially to the making and 
moulding of national history. The first great result of their work 
in training leaders we see in the Renaissance movement of the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to which we next turn. In 
this movement for a revival of the ancient learning, and the sub- 
sequent movements for a purer and a better religious life, the men 
trained by the universities were the leaders. 



236 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Why would the studia publica tend to attract a different type of schoia»' 
than those in the monasteries, and gradually to supersede them ip 
importance? 

2. Show how the mediaeval university was a gradual and natural evolution, 
as distinct from a founded university of to-day. 

3. Show that the university charter was a first step toward independence 
from church and state control. 

4. Show the relation between the system of apprenticeship developed fo; 
student and teacher in a mediaeval university, and the stages of studen/ 
and teacher in a university of to-day. : 

5. Show how the chartered university of the Middle Ages was an "associa- 
tion of like-minded men for worldly purposes." 

6. To what university mother does Harvard go back, ultimately? 

7. Show how the English and the German universities are extreme evolu- 
tions from the mediaeval type, and our American universities a combina- 
tion of the two extremes. 

8. Do university professors to-day have privileges akin to those granted 
professors in a mediaeval university? 

9. What has caused the old Arts Faculty to break up into so many groups, 
whereas Law, Medicine, and Theology have stayed united? 

10. Do universities, when founded to-day, usually start with all four of the 
mediaeval faculties represented? 

11. Which of the professional faculties has changed most in the nature and 
character of its instruction? Why has this been so? 

12. Enumerate a number of different things which have enabled the modern 
university greatly to shorten the period of instruction? 

13. Aside from differences in teachers, why are some university subjects to- 
day taught much more compactly and economically than other subjects? 

14. After admitting all the defects of the mediaeval university, why did the 
university nevertheless represent so important a development for the 
future of western civilization? 

15. What does the long continuance, without great changes in character, of 
the university as an institution indicate as to its usefulness to society? 

16. Does the university of to-day play as important a part in the progress of 
society as it did in the mediaeval times? Why? 

17. Is the chief university force to-day exerted directly or indirectly? 
Illustrate. 

18. What is probably the greatest work of any university, in any age? 

19. Compare the influence of the mediaeval university, and the Greek uni- 
versities of the ancient world. 

20. Explain the evolution of the English coUege system as an effort to im- 
prove discipline, morals, and thinking. Has it been successful in this? 

21. Show how the mediaeval university put books in the place of things, 
whereas the modern university tries to reverse this. 

22. Show how the rise of the universities gave an educated ruling class to 
Europe, even though the nobility may not have attended them. 

23. Show how, in an age of lawlessness, the universities symbolized the 
supremacy of mind over brute force. 

24. Show how the mediaeval universities aided civilization by breaking down, 
somewhat, barriers of nationality and ignorance among peoples. 

25. Show how the university stood, as the crowning effort of its time, in the 
slow upward struggle to rebuild civilization on the ruins of wbat had once 
been. 



THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES 237 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

100. Rashdall and Minerva: University Foundations before 1600. 
loi. Fr. Barbarossa: Privileges for Students who travel for Study. 

102. PhiHp Augustus: Privileges granted Students at Paris. 

103. Count Rupert; Charter of the University of Heidelberg. 

104. Philip IV: Exemption of Students and Masters from Taxation. 

105. Vercelli: Privileges granted to the University by the City. 

106. Villani: The Cost to a City of maintaining a University. 

107. Pope Gregory IX: Right to suspend Lectures (Cessatio). 

108. Roger of Wendover: a Cessatio at Oxford. 

109. Henry III: England invites Scholars to leave Paris. 

no. Pope Gregory IX: Early Licensing of Professors to teach. 

111. Pope Nicholas IV: The Right to grant Licenses to teach. 

112. Rashdall: A University License to teach. 

113. Paris Statutes, 1254: Books required for the Arts Degree. 

114. Leipzig Statutes, 1410: Books required for the Arts Degree. 

115. Oxford Statutes, 1408-31: Books required for the Arts Degree. 

116. Oxford, Fourteenth Century: Requirements for the Professional 
Degrees. 

(a) In Theology. (c) In Civil Law. 

(b) In Canon Law. (d) In Medicine. 

117. Paris Statutes, 1270-74: Requirements for the Medical Degree. 

118. Roger Bacon: On the Teaching of Theology. 

119. Master Stephen: Books left by Will to the University of Paris. 

120. Roger Bacon: The Scarcity of Books on Morals. 

121. Balaeus: Methods of Instruction in the Arts Faculty of Paris. 

122. Toulouse: Time-Table of Lectures in Arts, 1309. 

123. Leipzig: Time-Table of Lectures in Arts, 151Q. 

124. Rashdall: Value and Influence of the Mediaeval University. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. What does a glance at the page giving the university foundations before 
1600 (100) show as to the rate and direction of the university movement? 

2. How do you account for the very large privileges granted university 
students in the early grants (loi, 102) and charters (103)? Should a 
university student to-day have any privileges not given to aU citizens? 
Why? 

3. Do universities, when founded to-day, secure a charter? If so, from 
whom, and what terms are included? Do normal schools? What form 
of a charter, if any, has your university or normal school? 

4. Compare the freedom from taxation granted to masters and students 
at Paris (104) with the grant to professors at Brown University (187 b). 
Was the Brown University grant exceptional, or common in other 
American foundations? 

5. Do any American cities to-day maintain colleges or universities, as did 
the Italian cities (105)? Normal schools? Are somewhat similar ends 
served? 

6. What does the cessatio, as exercised by the mediaeval university (107, 
108), indicate as to standards of conduct on the part of teachers and 
students? 

7. Why is the licensing of university professors to teach not followed in our 



238 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

American universities? What has taken the place of the license? What 
did the media;val license (no, in, 112) really signify? 

8. Compare the license to teach (112) with a modern doctor's diploma. 

g. Compare the requirements for the Arts degree (113, 114, 115) with the 
requirements for the Baccalaureate degree at a modern university. 

10. Compare the additional length of time for professional degrees (i 1 6, 1 17). 

11. How do you account for the American practice of admitting students 
to the professional courses without the Arts course? What is the best 
American practice in this matter to-day, and what tendencies are 
observable? 

12. Characterize the medical course at Paris (117) from a modern point of 
view. 

13. Compare the instruction in medicine at Paris (117) and Oxford (116 d). 
How do you account for the superiority shown by one? Which one? 

14. What does the extract from Roger Bacon (118) indicate as to the char- 
acter of the teaching of Theology? 

15. What was the nature and extent of the hbrary of Master Stephen (119)? 
Compare such a library with that of a scholar of to-day. 

16. Show how the Paris statute as to lecturing (121) was an attempt at an 
improvement of the methods of instruction and individual thinking. 

17. What do the two time-tables reproduced (122, 123) reveal as to the 
nature of a university day, and the instruction given? 

18. Show how Rashdall's statement (i 24) that lawyers have been a civilizing 
agent is true. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Boase, Charles William. Oxford (Historic Towns Series). 

Clark, Andrew. The Colleges at Oxford. 

Clark, J. W. Libraries in the Mcdiceval and Renaissance Periods. 
*Clark, J. W. The Care of Books. 

Corbin, John. An American at Oxford. 
*Compayre, G. Abelard, and the Origin and Early History of the Universi- 
ties. 
*Jebb, R. C. The Work of the Universities for the Nation. 

Mullinger, J. B. History of the University of Cambridge. 
*Norton, A. O. Readings in the History of Education; MedicBval Universi- 
ties. 
*Paetow, L. J. The Arts Course at Mcdiceval Universities. (Univ. 111. 

Studies, vol. in, no. 7, Jan. 1910). 
*Paulsen, Fr. The German Universities. 

Rait, R. S. Life of a Mediceval University. 
*Rashdall, H. Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. 

Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. I. 

Sheldon, Henry. Student Life and Customs. 



PART III 

THE TRANSITION FROM MEDIEVAL TO MODERN 
ATTITUDES 

THE RECOVERY OF THE ANCIENT LEARNING 

THE REAWAKENING OF SCHOLARSHIP 

AND THE RISE OF RELIGIOUS 

AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 



CHAPTER X 
THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 

The period of change. The thirteenth century has often been 
called the wonderful century of the mediaeval world. It was won- 
derful largely in that the forces struggling against mediasvalism to 
evolve the modem spirit here first find clear expression. It was a 
century of rapid and unmistakable progress in almost every line. 
By its close great changes were under way which were destined 
ultimately to shake off the incubus of mediaevalism and to trans- 
form Europe. In many respects, though, the fourteenth was a 
still more wonderful century. 

The evolution of the universities which we have just traced 
was one of the most important of these thirteenth-century mani- 
festations. Lacking in intellectual material, but impelled by the 
new impulses beginning to work in the world, the scholars of the 
time went earnestly to work, by speculative methods, to organize 
the dogmatic theology of the Church into a system of thinking. 

\'Jhe result was Scholasticism. From one point of view the result 
^as barren; from another it was full of promise for the future. 
Though the workers lacked materials, were overshadowed by the 
mediseval spirit of authority, and kept their efforts clearly within 
limits approved by the Church, the "heroic industry" and the 
"intense appHcation" displayed in effecting the organization, 
and the logical subtlety developed in discussing the results, prom- 
ised much for the future. The rise of university instruction, and 
the work of the Scholastics in organizing the knowledge of the 
time, were both a resultant of new influences already at work and 
a prediction of larger consequences to follow. In a later age, and 
with men more emancipated from church control, the same spirit 
was destined to burst forth in an effort to discover and recon- 
struct the historic past. 

During the thirteenth centur>', too, the new Estate, which had 
come into existence alongside of the clergy and the nobility, began 
to assume large importance. The arts-and- crafts guilds were at- 
taining a large development, and out of this new burgher class the 
great general public of modem times has in time evolved. Trade 
and industry were increasing in all lands, and merchants and sue- 



242 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

cessful artisans were becoming influential through their newly 
obtained wealth and rights. The erection of stately churches and 
town halls, often beautifully carved and highly ornamented, was 
taking place. Great cathedrals, those "symphonies in stone," 
of which Notre Dame (Figure 53) is a good example, were rising 
or being further expanded and decorated at many places in 
western Europe. Mystery and miracle plays had begun to be per- 
formed and to attract great attention. In the fourteenth century 
religious pageants were added. "All art was still religion," but 
an art was unmistakably arising amid cathedral-building and the 
setting-forth of the Christian mysteries, and before long this was 
to flower in modem forms of expression in painting, sculpture, 
and the drama. 

The new spirit of nationality. The new spirit moving in west- 
em Europe also found expression in the evolution of the modem 
European States, based on the new national feeling. As the 
kingly power in these was consolidated, the developing States, 
each in its own domain, began to curb the dominion of the uni- 
versal Church, slowly to deprive it of the governmental functions 
it had assumed and exfems^for so long, and to confine the Pope 
and clergy more and more to their original functions as religious 
agents. The Papacy as a temporal power passed the maximum 
period of its greatness early in the thirteenth century; in the 
nineteenth century the last vestiges of its temporal power were 
taken away. 

New national languages also were coming into being, and the 
national epics of the people — th^ Cid, the Arthurian Legends, 
the Chansons, and the Nibelungen Lied — were reduced to writ- 
ing. With the introduction from the East, toward the close of 
the thirteenth century, of the process of making paper for writ- 
ing, and with the increase of books in the vernacular, the English, 
French, Spanish, Italian, and German languages rapidly took 
shape. Their development was expressive of the new spirit in 
western Europe, as also was the fact that Dante (1264-1321), 
"the first literary layman since Boethius" (d. 524), wrote his 
great poem, The Divine Comedy, in his native Italian instead of in 
the Latin which he knew so well — an evidence of independence 
of large future import. New native literatures were springing 
forth all over Europe. Beginning with the troubadours in south- 
em France (p. 186), and taken up by the trouveres in northern 
France and by the minnesingers in German lands, the new poetry 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 243 

of nature and love and Joy of living had spread everywhere.^ A 
new race of men was b'^^i^nuig to "sing songs as blithesome and 
gay as the birds" and to express in ihese songs the joys of the 
world here below. 

Transformation of the mediaeval man. The fourteenth cen- 
tury was a period of still more rapid change and transformation. 
New objects of interest were coming to the front, and new stand- 
ards of judgment were being applied. National spirit and a na- 
tional patriotism were finding expression. The mediaeval man, 
with his feeling of personal insignificance, lack of self-confidence, 
"no sense of the past behind him, and no conception of the possi- 
bilities of the future before him," - was rapidly giving way to the 
man possessed of the modem spirit — the man of self-confidence, 
conscious of his powers, enjoying life, feeling his connection with 
the historic past, and realizing the potentiaHties of accomplish- 
ment in the world here below. It was the great work of the period 
of transition, and especially of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies, to effect this change, " to awaken in man a consciousness of 
his powers, to give him confidence in himself, to show him the 
beauty of the world and the joy of life, and to make him feel his 
living connection with the past and the greatness of the future he 

^ One of the best known of the Troubadours was Arnaul de Marveil. The follow- 
ing specimen of his art reveals both the new love of nature and the reaction which 
had clearly set in against the " other- worldliness " of the preceding centuries: 

"Oh! how sweet the breeze of April, 

Breathing soft as May draws near, 
While, through nights of tranquil beauty, 

Songs of gladness meet the ear: 
Every bird his well-known language 

Uttering in the morning's pride. 
Reveling in joy and gladness 

By his happy partner's side. 

"When around me all is smiling. 

When to life the young birds spring, 
Thoughts of love I cannot hinder 

Come, my heart inspiriting — 
Nature, habit, both incline me 

In such joy to bear my part: 
With such sounds of bliss around me 
Could I wear a sadden'd heart? " 

2 "Tn the Middle Ages man as an individual had been held of very little account. 
He was only part of a great machine. He acted only through some corporation — 
the commune, guild, the order. He had but little self-confidence, and very little 
consciousness of his ability single-handed to do great things or overcome great diffi- 
culties. Life was so hard and narrow that he had no sense of the joy of living, and 
no feeling for the beauty of the world around him, and, as if this world were not 
dark enough, the terrors of another world beyond were very near and real." (Adams. 
G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d ed., p. 363.) 



244 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



might create." ^ As soon as men began clear!}- to experience such 
feelings, they began to inquire, and inquiry led to the realization 
that there had been a great historic past of which they knew but 
little, and of which they wanted to know much. When this point 
had been reached, western Europe was ready for a revival of 
learning. 

The beginnings in Italy. This revival began in Italy. The 
Italians had preserved more of the old Roman culture than had 
any other people, and had been the first to develop a new political 
and social order and revive the refinements of life after the deluge 
of barbarism which had engulfed Europe. They, too, had been 
the first to feel the inadequacy of mediaeval learning to satisfy 
the intellectual unrest of men conscious of new standards of life. 
This gave them at least a century of advance over the nations 
of northern Europe. The old Roman life also was nearer to 
them, and meant more, so that a movement for a revival of inter- 
est in it attracted to it the finest young minds of central and north- 
em Italy and inspired in them something closely akin to patriotic 
fervor. They felt themselves the direct heirs of the political and 

intellectual eminence of Imperial Rome, 
and they began the work of restoring 
to themselves and of trying to under- 
stand their inheritance. 

In Petrarch (1304-74) we have the 
beginnings of the movement. He has 
been called "the first modem scholar 
and man of letters." Repudiating the 
other-worldliness ideal and the scho- 
lastic learning of his time,^ possessed 
of a deep love for beauty in nature and 
art, a delight in travel, a desire for 
worldly fame, a strong historical sense, 
and the self-confidence to plan a great 
constructive work, he began the task of 
unearthing the monastic .treasures to 
ascertain what tlie past had been and known and done. At 
twenty-nine he made his first great discovery, at Liege, in the 
form of two previously unknown orations of Cicero. Twelve 

* Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle yiges, 2d. ed., p. 364. 

* Petrarch refused to have the works of the Scholastics in his library. Though a 
university man, he was out of sympathy with the university methods of his time. 




Fig. 68. Petrarch 

(1304-74) 

'The Morning Star of the 
Renaissance" 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 



245 



years later, at Verona, he found half of one of the letters of 
Cicero which had been lost for ages. All his life he collected 
and copied manuscripts. His letter to a friend telling him of his 
difficulty in getting a work of Cicero copied, and his joy in doing 
the work himself (R. 125), is typical of his labors. He began the 
work of copying and comparing the old classical manuscripts, and 
from them reconstructing the past. He also wrote many son- 
nets, ballads, lyrics, and letters, all filled with a new modem 
classical spirit. He also constructed the 
first modem map of Italy. 

Through Boccaccio, whom he first met 
in 1350, Fetrarch's work was made'known 
inTlorenc^Tthen the wealthiest and most 
artistic and literary city in the world, ^ 
and there the new knowledge and method 
were warmly received. Boccaccio equaled 
Petrarch in his passion for the ancient 
writers, hunting for them wherever he 
thought they might be found. One of 
his pupils has left us a melancholy picture 
of the library at Monte Cassino, as Boc- 
caccio found it at the time of his visit 
(R. 126). He wrote a book of popular 
tales and romances, filled with the mod- 
em spirit, whi^h made him the father of Itahan prose as Dante 
was of Italian poetry; prepared the first dictionaries of classical 
geography and Greek mythology; and was the first western 
scholar to leam Greek. 

"In the dim light of learning's dawn they stand, 
Flushed with the first glimpses of a long-lost land." 

A century of recovery and reconstruction. The work done by 
these two friends in discovering and editing was taken up by 
others, and during the century (1333-1433) dating from the first 
great "find" of Petrarch the principal additions to Latin litera- 
ture were made. The monasteries and castles of Europe were 
ransacked in the hope of discovering something new, or more ac- 




FiG. 6g. Boccaccio 

(1313-75) 
The Father of Italian Prose " 



^ "Florence was essentially the city of intelligence in early modem times. Other 
fiations have surpassed the Italians in their genius . . . but nowhere else except at 
Athens has the whole population of a city been so permeated with ideas, so highly 
tntellectual by nature, so keen in perception, so witty and so subtle, as at Florence." 
(Symonds, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy.) 



246 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

curate copies of previously known books. At monasteries and 
churches as widely separated as Monte Cassino, near Naples: 
Lodi, near Milan; Milan, itself; and Vercelli, in Italy: Saint Gall 
and other monasteries, in Switzerland: Paris; Cluny, near the 
present city of Macon; Langres, near the source of the Mame; 
and monasteries in the Vosges Mountains, in France: Corvey, in 
Westphalia ; and Hersf eld, Cologne, and Mainz in Germany — 
important finds were made.^ Thus widely had the old Latin 
authors been scattered, copied, and forgotten. In a letter to a 
friend (R. 127 a) the enthusiast, Poggio Bracciolini, tells of finding 
(1416) the long-lost Institutes of Oratory of Quintilian, at Saint 
Gall, and of copying it for posterity. This, and the reply of his 
friend (R. 127 b), reveal something of the spirit and the emotions 
of those engaged in the recovery of Latin literature and the re- 
construction of Roman history. 

The finds, though, while important, were after all of less value 
than the spirit which directed the search, or the careful work 
which was done in collecting, comparing, questioning, inferring, 
criticizing, and editing corrected texts, and reconstructing old 
Roman life and history.- We have in this new work a complete 
break with scholastic methods, and we see in it the awakening of 
the modem scientific spirit.^ It was this same critical, construc- 
tive spirit which, when applied later to Christian practices, 
brought on the Reformation ; when applied to the problems of the 
universe, revealed to men the wonderful world of science; and 
when applied to problems of government, led to the questioning 
of the theory of the divine right of kings, and to the evolution of 
democracy. We have here a modem spirit, a craving for truth 
for its own sake, an awakening of the historical sense,^ and an ap- 

1 Sandys, J. E., in his Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, pp. 35-41, gives 
«i list of the more important later finds, which see. 

2 Of the Florentine scholars one of the most famous was Niccolo Niccoli (1363- 
1436), of whom Sandys says: "Famous for his beautiful penmanship, he was much 
more than a copyist. He collected manuscripts, compared and collated their vari- 
ous readings, struck out the more obvious corruptions, restored the true text, broke 
it up into convenient paragraphs, added suitable summaries at the head of each, and 
did much toward laying the foundation of textual criticism." (Sandys, J. E., 
Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, p. 39.) 

^ For example, Laurentius Valla (1407-57) of Pavia, exceeded Niccoli in ability 
in textual criticism. He extended this method to the New Testament and, at the 
request of King Alphonso, of Naples, subjected the so-called " Donation of Constan- 
tine," a document upon which the Papacy based in part its claims to temporal power, 
to the tests of textual criticism and showed its historical impossibility. This, in- 
deed, was a new and daring spirit in the mediaeval world, but it represented the 
spirit and method of the modern scholar. 

* For example, Ciriaco, of Ancona (1391-1450), has been called "the Schliemann 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 247 

preciation of beauty in literature and nature which was soon to be 
followed by an appreciation of beauty in art. A worship of 
classical literature and classical ideas now set in, of which rich and 
prosperous Florence became the center, with Venice and Rome, 
as well as a number of the northern Italian cities, as centers of 
more than minor importance. 

The revival of Greek in the West. With the new interest in 
Latinjiterature it was but natural that a revival of the study of 
Greek should follow. While a knowledge of Greek had not abso- 
lutely died out in the West during the Middle Ages, there were 
very few scholars who knew anything about it, and none who 
could read it.^ It was natural, too, that the revival of it should 
come first in Italy. Southern Italy (Magna Grcecia) had re- 
mained under the Eastern Empire and Greek until its conquest 
by the Normans (1041-71), and to southern Italy a few Greek 
monks had from time to time migrated. With southern Italy, 
though, papal Italy and the western Christian world seem to have 
had little contact. In 1339, and again in 1342, a Greek monk 
from southern Italy visited the Pope, coming as an ambassador 
from Constantinople, and from him Petrarch learned the Greek 
alphabet. In 1353 another envoy brought Petrarch a copy of 
Homer. This he could not read, but in time (1367) a poor trans- 
lation into Latin was effected. Boccaccio studied Greek, being 
the first western scholar to read Homer in the original. 

Near the end of the fourteenth century it became known in 
Florence that Manuel Chr^'soloras (c. 1350-1415), a Byzantine of 
noble birth^ a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy at Constanti- 
nople, and the most accomplished Greek scholar of his age, had 
arrived in Venice as an envoy from the Eastern Emperor. Flor- 
entine scholars visited him, and on his return accompanied him to 

of his time." He spent his life in travel and in copjang and editing inscriptions. 
After exploring Italy, he visited the Greek isles, Constantinople, Ephesos, Crete, and 
Damascus. One of his contemporaries, Flavio Blondo, of Forli (1388-1463), pub- 
lished a four-volume work on the antiquities and historj' of Rome and Italy. These 
two men helped to found the new science of classical archaeology. 

1 Classical scholars assert that Greek became extinct in the Italy of the Roman 
Church in 6qo a.d. Greek was taught at Canterbury in the days of the learned 
Theodore, of Tarsus (R. 59 a), who died in 690. Irish monks, who carried Greek 
from Gaul to Ireland in the fifth century, brought it back in the seventh century to 
Saint Gall, founded by them in 614. "John the Scot," an Irish monk who was mas- 
ter of the Palace School under Charles the Bald (c. 845-55), is said to have been able 
to read Greek. Roger Bacon, the Oxford monk (1214-94), also knew a little Greek. 
William of Moerbeke, in 1260, was able to translate the Rhetoric and Politics of Aris- 
totle for Thomas, Aquinas. Greek monks were still found in the extreme south of 
Italy at the timeof the Renaissance, and Greek has remained a living language in 
1 few villages there up to the present time. 



248 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Constantinople to learn Greek. In 1396 Chrysoloras was invited 
by Florence to accept an appointment, in the university there, to 
the first chair of Greek letters in the West, and accepted. From 
1396 to 1400 he taught Greek in the rich and stately city of Flor- 
ence, at that time the intellectual and artistic center of Christen- 
dom. For a few years, beginning in 1402, he also taught Greek at 
the University of Pavia. He had earlier written a Catechism of 
Greek Grammar, and at Pavia he began a literal rendering of 
Plato's Republic into Latin. From his visit dates the enthusiasm 
for the study of Greek in the West. 

Other Greek scholars arrive in Italy. Chrysoloras returned to 
Constantinople for a time, in 1403, and Guarino of Verona, who 
had been one of his pupils, accompanied him and spent five years 
there as a member of his household. When he returned to Italy 
he brought with him about fifty manuscripts, and before his death 
he had translated a number of them into Latin. He also pre- 
pared a Greek grammar which superseded that of Chrysoloras. 
In 141 2 he was elected to the chair at Florence formerly held by 
Chrysoloras, and later he established an important school at 
Ferrara, based largely on instruction in the Latin and Greek 
classics, which will be referred to again in the next chapter. 

A rage for Greek learning and Greek books now for a time set 
in. Aurispa, a Sicilian, went to Constantinople, learned Greek, 
and returned to Italy, in 1422, with 238 Greek manuscripts, 
Messer Filelfo, of Padua, after seven years at Constantinople, re- 
turned, in 1427, with forty manuscripts and with the grand-niece 
of Chrysoloras as his wife. In 1448 Theodorus Gaza (c. 1400- 
75), a learned Greek from the city of Thessalonica, who had fled 
from his native city just before its capture by the Turks (1430), 
came to Ferrara as the first professor of Greek in the university 
there. He made many translations, prepared a very popular 
Greek grammar, and in 145 1 became professor of philosophy at 
Rome. 
■^ Another Greek of importance was Demetrius Chalcondyles of 
Athens (1424-1511), who reached Italy 11^1447. I^ 145° he be- 
came professor of Greek at Perugia, and of his lectures there one 
of his enthusiastic pupils ^ wrote: 

A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to teach me with great 
pains, and I to listen to his precepts with incredible pleasure, because 

' Gian Antonio Campano; trans, by J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, vol. 
II, p. 249. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 



249 



he is a Greek, because he is an Athenian, and because he is Demetrius. 
It seems to me that in him is figured all the wisdom, the civility, and 
the elegance of those so famous and illustrious ancients. Merely seeing 
him you fancy you are looking on Plato; far more when you hear him 
speak. 

In 1463 Demetrius transferred to Padua as professor of Greek, 
and was the first professor of Greek in a western European uni- 
versity to be paid a fixed salary. 
He also taught for a time at Milan, 
and from 147 1 to 1491 was profes- 
sor of Greek at Florence. 

A number of other learned Greeks 
had reached Italy prior to the fall of 
Constantinople (1453) before the 
advancing Turks, ^ and after its 
fall many more sought there a new 
home. Many of these found, on 
landing, that their knowledge of 
Greek and the possession of a few 
Greek books were an open sesame 
to the learned circles of Italy. 

Enthusiasm for the new move- 
ment; libraries and academies 
founded. The enthusiasm for the 
recovery and restoration of ancient 
literature and history which this 
work awakened among the younger 
scholars of Italy can be imagined, 
sors in the universities and most of 




Fig. 70. Demetrius 
Chalcondyles (1424-15 1 i) 

(DrawTi from a picture of a fresco 
by Ghirlandajo, painted in 1490, on 
the walls of the church of Santa Maria 
Novella, at Florence) 



While most of the profes- 
the church officials at first 
'had nothing to do with the new movement, being wedded to 
scholastic methods of thinking, the leaders of the new learning 
drew about them many of the brightest and most energetic of the 
young men who came to those universities which were hospitable 
to the new movement.^ Greek scholars in the university towns 

1 For long it was thought that the revival of the study of Greek in the West dated 
from the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, but this idea has been exploded by classical 
scholars. The events we have enumerated in this chapter show this, and at least 
five of the important Greek scholars who taught in Italy came before that date. As 
the Turks closed in on this wonderful eastern city, for so long the home of Greek 
learning and culture, many other Greek scholars fled westward. The principal 
Greek authors had, however, been translated into Latin before then. 

^ Some of the Italian universities participated but little in the new movement. 
Bologna and Pavia, in particular, held to their primacy in law and were but little 
affected by the revival. 



250 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

were followed by admiring bands of younger students,^ who soon 
took up the work and superseded their masters. Academies, 
named after the one conducted by Plato in the groves near Ath- 
ens, whose purpose was to promote literary studies, were founded 
in all the important Italian cities (R. 129). The members usually 
Latinized their names, and celebrated the ancient festivals. In 
Venice a Greek Academy was formed m which all the proceedings 
were in Greek, and the members were known by Greek names. 
The Academia of Aldus, at Venice, of which his celebrated press 
was a department, became a veritable university for classical 
learning, and to participate in its proceedings scholars came from 
many lands. It was the curious and enthusiastic Italians who, 
more than the Greek scholars who taught them the language, 
opened up the literature and history of Athens to the comprehen- 
sion of the western world. 

The financial support of the movement came from the wealthy 
merchant princes, reigning dukes, and a few church authorities, 
who assisted scholars and spent money most liberally in collecting 
manuscripts and accumulating books. Says S^monds: 

Never was there a time in the world's history when money was spent 
more freely upon the collection and preservation of MSS., and when a 
more complete machinery was put in motion for the sake of securing 
literary treasures. Prince vied with prince, and eminent burgher with 
burgher, in buying books. The commercial correspondents of the 
Medici and other great Florentine houses, whose banks and discount 
offices extended over Europe and the Levant, were instructed to pur- 
chase relics of antiquity without regard for cost, and to forward them 
to Florence. The most acceptable present that could be sent to a king 
was a copy of a Roman historian. The best credentials which a young 
Greek arriving from Byzantium could use to gain the patronage of men 
like Palla degli Strozzi was a fragment of sOme ancient ; the merchan- 
dise insuring the largest profit to a speculator who had special knowl- 
edge in such matters was old parchment covered with crabbed char- 
acters. ^ 

Cpsimo de' Medici (1393-1464), a banker and ruler of Florence, 
spent great sums in collecting and copying manuscripts. Ves- 
pasiano, a fifteenth-century bookseller of Florence, has left us an 

1 Bessarion (c. 1403-72), at one time Archbishop of Nicaea and afterwards a car- 
dinal at Rome, is said to have been surrounded by a crowd of Greek and Latin 
scholars whenever he went out, and who escorted him every morning from his palace 
to the Vatican. He was a great patron of learned Greeks who fled to Italy. On his 
death he gave his entire library of Greek manuscripts to Venice, and this collection 
formed the foundation of the celebrated library of Saint Mark's. 

2 Symonds, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy, vol. 11, p. 139. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 251 

interesting picture of the work of Cosimo in founding (1444) the 
great Medicean hbrary ^ at Florence (R. 130) and of the difficul- 
ties of book collecting in the days before the invention of printing. 



Fig. 71. Bookcase and Desk in the JNIedicean Library 

AT Florence 

(DrawTi from a photograph) 

This library was founded in 1444. It contains to-day about 10,000 
Greek and Latin manuscripts, many of them very rare, and of a 
few the only copies known. The building was designed by IVIichael 
Angelo, and its construction was begun in 1525. The bookcases are 
of about this date. It shows the early method of chaining books to 
the shelves, and cataloguing the volumes on the end of each stack. 

Under Cosimo's grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, who died in 
1492, two expeditions were sent to Greece to obtain manuscripts 
for the Florentine library. Vespasiano also describes for us the 
books collected (c. 1475-80) for the great ducal library at Urbino 
(R. 131), the greatest library in the Christian world at the time of 

^ In 1436, Niccolo de Niccoli, a copyist of Florence, died, leaN^ng his collection 
of eight hundred manuscripts to the Medicean Library for the use of the public, 
meaning thereby any scholar. This is said to have been the first pubUc-library 
collection in westam Europe. 



252 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

its completion, and the work of Pope Nicholas V ^ (1447-1455) 
in laying the foundations (1450) for the great Vatican Library at 
Rome (R. 132). Nicholas was an enthusiast in the new move- 
ment, and formed a plan for the translation of all the Greek 
writers into Latin, A later Pope, Leo X (1513-1521), planned 
to make Rome the international center for Greek learning^ 

The movement extends to other countries. Petrarch made his 
first great find in 1333, and up to 1450 the Revival of Learning, 
often termed the Renaissance, was entirely an Italian movement. 
By that date the great work in Italy had been done, and the 
Italians were once more in possession of the literature and history 
of the past. With them the movement was literary, historical, 
and patriotic in purpose and spirit. With them the movement 
was known as huma nism^ from an old Roman word (humanitas) 
meaning culture, and this term came to be applied to the new 
studies in all other lands. In their work with the literatures, in- 
scriptions, coins, and archaeological remains of the Greeks and 
Romans, their own literature, history, mythology, and political 
and social life was reconstructed. The methods employed were 
the methods used in modem science, and the result was to develop 
in Italy a new type of scholar, possessed of a literary., artistic, and 
historical appreciation unknown since the days of ancient Rome, 
\ and with the greatest enthusiasm for Latin as a living language. 

By the time the revival had culminated in Italy it began to be 
heard of north of the Alps. France was the first country to take 
up the study of Greek, a professorship being estabHshed at Paris 
in 1458. There was but little interest in the subject, however, or 
in any of the new studies, until two events of political importance, 
forty years later, brought Frenchmen in close touch with what 
had been done in northern Italy. In 1494 Charles VIII, of 
France, claiming Naples as his possession, took an army into 
Italy, and forcibly occupied Rome and Florence. Four years 
later his successor, Louis XII, claimed Milan also and seized it 
and Naples, maintaining a French court at Milan from 1498 to 
151 2. Though both these expeditions were unsuccessful, from a 
pohtical point of view, the effect of the direct contact with hu- 

1 Nicholas as a monk had had his enthusiasm for the new movement awakened, 
and had gone deeply into debt for manuscripts. He was helped by Casimo de' 
Medici. When he became Pope (1447-55) he collected scholars about him, built up 
the university at Rome, laid the foundations of the great Vatican Library, and made 
Rome a great literary center. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent at Flor- 
ence, in 1492, the glory that had been Florence passed to Rome, and it in turn be- 
came the cultural center of Christendom. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 



253 



manism in its home was lasting. New ideas in architecture, art, 
and learning were carried back to France, French scholars tra/- 
eled to Italy, and early in the sixteenth century Paris became a 
center for the new humanistic studies. In Greek, France com- 
pletely superseded Italy as the interpreter of Greek hfe and litera- 
ture to the modem world. 

In 1473 a Spanish scholar, Mebrissensis (1444-1522), returned 
home after twenty years in Italy and introduced Greek at Se- 
ville, Salamanca, and Alcala. 




Rudolph Agricola (1443-85) Thomas Linacre (c. 1460-1524) 

Early Dutch Humanist. Lectured at English Professor of Medicine and 

Heidelberg Lecturer on Greek 

(From a contemporary engraving) (From a portrait in the British 

Museum) 

Fig. 72. Two Early Northern Humanists 

About 1488 Thomas Linacre (c. 1460-15 24) and William Gro- 
cyn (1446-15 14), two Oxford graduates, went to Florence from 
England, studying Greek under Demetrius Chalcondyles, and, 
returning, introduced the new learning at Oxford.^ Linacre, as 
professor of medicine, translated much of Galen (p. 198) from 
the Greek, and he and Grocyn lectured on Greek at the Univer- 

' Much earlier, another Oxford man had returned from study under Guarino at 
Ferrara — -William Gray (1449) — but he seems to have made no impression. A 
few other scholars went before Linacre and Grocyn and Colet, but these men were 
the first to attract attention on their return. 



254 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

sity. From Oxford the new learning was transmitted to Cam- 
bridge, and, over a century afterward, to Harvard in America. A 
third Oxford man to study Greek in Italy was John Colet (1467- 
15 19), who studied in Florence from 1493 to 1496, and returned 
home an enthusiastic humanist. He was the first Englishman to 
attract much attention to the new studies, and to him is chiefly 
due their introduction into the English secondary school. 

The first German of whom we have any record as having stud- 
ied in Italy was Peter Luder (c. 1415-74), who returned in 1456, 
and lectured on the new learning at the Universities of Heidel- 
berg, Erfurt, and Leipzig, but awakened no response. In 1470 
Johann Wessel (1420-89) and in 1476 Rodolph Agricola (1443- 
85), two noted Dutch scholars, studied in Italy. On returning, 
Agricola,^ who has been called "the Petrarch of German lands," 
did much "to spread the great inheritance of antiquity and the 
new civilization to which it had given birth among his uncouth 
countrymen" {barbari, he calls them). He made Heidelberg, for 
a time, a center of humanistic appreciation.' Johann Reuchlin 
(1455-1522), a German by birth, studied in Florence and else- 
where in Italy in 1481 to 1490, and there learned Hebrew. Re- 
turning, he became a professor at Heidelberg and the father of 
modem Hebrew studies. In 1 506 he published the first Hebrew 
grammar. In 1493 the University of Erfurt established a j)ro- 
fessorship of Poetry and Eloquence, this being the first German 
university to countenance the new learning. In 1523 the first 
chair of Greek was established at Vienna. Thus slowly did the 
revival of learning spread to northern lands. 

The revival aided by the invention of paper and printing. Very 
fortunately for the spread of the new learning an important 
process and a great invention now came in at a most opportune 
time. The process was the manufacture of paper; the invention 
that of printing. 

The manufacture of paper is probably a Chinese invention, 
early obtained by the Arabs. During the Mohammedan occupa- 
tion of Spain paper mills were set up there, and a small supply of 
their paper found its way across the Pyrenees. The Christians 
who drove the Mohammedans out lost the process, and it now 
came back once more from the East. By about 1250 the Greeks 
had obtained the process from Mohammedan sources, and in 1276 

^ Agricola's real name was Roelof Huysman, meaning " Roelof the husband- 
man." In keeping with a common practice of the time he Latinized his name 
\aking the eauivalent Roman word. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 



255 



the first paper mill was set up in Italy. In 1340 a paper factory- 
was established at Padua, and soon thereafter other factories be- 
gan to make paper at Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Venice. In 
1320 a paper factory was established at Mainz, in Germany, and 
in 1390 another at Nuremberg. By 1450 paper was in common 
use and the way was now open 
for one of the world's greatest 
inventions. 

This was the invention of 
printing. From the difhculty 
experienced in securing books 
for the great libraries at Flor- 
ence, Urbino, and Rome, as 
we have seen (Rs. 130, 131, 
132), and the great cost of 
reproducing single copies of 
books, we can see that the 
work of the humanists of the 
fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
turies in Italy probably would 
have had but little influence 
elsewhere but for the inven- 
tion of printing. To dissemi- 
nate a new learning involving 
two great literatures by copy- 
ing books, one at a time by 
hand, would have prevented 
instruction in the new sub- 
jects becoming general for 
centuries, and would have 
materially retarded the pro- 
gress of the world. The discovery of the art of printing, coming 
when it did, scattered the new learning over Europe. 
^ Spread and work of the press. The dates connected with this 
new invention and its diffusion over Europe are: 

1423. Coster of Harlem made the first engraved singk page. 
1438. Gutenberg invented movable wooden types. 
1450. Schoeffer and Faust cast first metal type. 
1456. Bible printed in Latin by Gutenberg and Faust at Mainz. 
This the first complete book printed. ^ 

1 This was bound in two volumes, and in 191 1 a copy of it was sold at a sale of 
old books, in New York City, for $50,000. 




Fig. 



73. An Early Sixteenth- 
Century Press 



"The prynters haue founde a crafte to make 
bokis by brasen letters sette in ordre by a 
frame." An engraving, dated 1520. The 
man at the right is setting type, and the 
one at the lever is making an impression. 
A number of four-page printed sheets are 
seen on the table at the right of the press. 



256 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

1457. The Mayence Psalter, the first dated book, printed.^ 

1462. Adolph of Nassau pillaged Mainz, drove out the printers, and 

in consequence scattered the art over FAiroi)e. 
1465. Press set up in the German monastery of Subiaco, in the 

Sabine Mountains, in Italy. 
1467. This press moved to Rome. 
146Q. Presses at Paris and Vienna. 

1470. Printing introduced into Switzerland. 

147 1. Presses set up at Florence, Milan, and Ferrara. 

1473. Printing introduced into Holland and Belgium. 

1474. Printing introduced into S})ain. 

1474-77. Printing introduced into England. Caxton set up his press 
in 1477. 
1476. First book printed in Greek at Milan. 

1490. The Aldine press established at Venice, by Aldus Manutius. 
1 501. First Greek book printed in Germany, at Erfurt. 
1563. First newspaper estabhshed, in Venice. 

Inventions traveled but slowly in tliose days, yet in time the 
press was to be found in every country of Europe. The profes- 
sional copyists made a great outcry against the innovation; 
presses were at first licensed and closely limited in number; in 
France tlie University of Paris was given the proceeds of a tax 
levied on all books printed; and in England the beginnings of the 
modem copyright are to be seen in the necessity of obtaining a 
license from the ecclesiastical authorities to be permitted to print 
a book. 

•^ Ipff to 6nolbe t^aaf fe of Wfcme 50; 
ucinepfe, (^nt> fo fct fo fe?x wntpnueH? tfc« 
5^ of ^^0fi>^p/focdte$nn$i!€noto3H)fe 

Fig. 74. An E.\rly Specimen of Caxton's Printing 

In cutting and casting the first t}npc a style of heavy-faced let- 
ter, much like that written by the mediaeval monks — the so- 
called Gothic^ was used. Caxton, m England, used this at first, 

1 A second editi^'^'f this Psalter was printed two years later, and contains at the 
end, in Latin, a statement which Robinson translates as follows: The present vol- 
ume of the Psalms, which is adorned with handsome capitals and is clearly divided 
bv means of rubrics, was produced not by writing with a pen, but by an ingenious 
invention of printed characters: and was completed to the glory of C.od and the 
honor of Saint James by John Fust, a citizen ot Mayence, and Peter Schoifher ot 
Gemsheim, in the year of our Lord i4S9. on the 29th of August. 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 257 

and the Germans have continued its use up to the present time. 
The Italians, however, soon devised a type with letters like those 
used by the old Romans — the so-called Roman type, this type — 
which was soon accepted in all non-German European countries. 
The Italians also devised a compressed type — the Italic — 
which enabled printers to get more words on a page. 

Venice, almost from the first, became the center of the book 
trade, and books literally poured from the presses there. By 
1500 as many as five thousand editions, often of as many as a 
thousand copies to an edition, had been printed In Italy. ^ Of 
this number 2835 had been printed in Venice, and most of them 
by the Aldine press of Aldus Manutius, and edited by the Aca- 
demia (p. 250) connected therewith.^ By 1500 many books had 
also been printed in a number of northern cities,' and Lyons, 
Paris, Basel, Nuremberg, Cologne, Leipzig, and London soon 
became centers of the northern book trade. Caxton in England 
soon vied with Aldus in Venice as a printer of beautiful books. 
When we remember that it required fifty-three days (Sandys) to 
make by hand one copy of Quintilian's Institutes, and forty-five 
copyists twenty- two months to reproduce two hundred volumes 
for the Medicean Library at Florence (R. 130), the enormous im- 
portance of an invention which would print rapidly a thousand or 
more copies of a book, all exactly alike and free from copyist 
errors, can be appreciated. It tremendously cheapened books,* 
made the general use of the textbook method of teaching possible, 
and paved the way for a great extension of schools and learning 
(R. 134). From now on the press became a formidable rival to 
the pulpit and the sermon, and one of the greatest of instruments 
for human progress and individual liberty. From this time on 
educational progress was to be much more rapid than it had been 
in the past. From an educational point of view the invention of 
printing might almost be taken as marking the close of the medi- 
aeval and the beginning of modern times. 

Rise of geographical discovery. The new influences awakened 
by the Revival of Learning found expression in other directions. 

' The usual early edition was three hundred copies. 

"^ At Florence about three hundred editions are said to have been printed before 
1500; at Bologna, 298; at Milan, 625; and at Rome, 925. 

' The following numbers of difTerent editions are said to have been printed at the 
northern cities before 1500: Paris, 751; Cologne, 530; Strassburg, 526; Nuremberg, 
382; Leipzig, 351; Basel, 320; Augsburg, 256; Louvain, 116; Mayence, 134; Deven- 
ter, i6q; London, 130; Oxford, 7; Saint Albans, 4. 

^ By 1500 it is said that a book could be purchased for the equivalent of fifty 
cents which a half century before would have cost fifty dollars. 



258 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



One of these was geographical discovery, itself an outgrowth of 
that series of movements known as the Crusades, with the accom- 
panying revival of trade and commerce. These led to travel, ex- 
ploration, and discovery. By the latter part of the thirteenth 
century the most extensive travel which had taken place since the 
days of ancient Rome had begun, and in the next two and a half 
centuries a great expansion of the known world took place. 



^*^..s. 




Untcnoirn 
Uncertain, 
{possibly knovm) 

deplored Region I 



l^iG. 75. The World as known to Christian Europe before Columbus 

MarccL^Polp and Sir John Mandeville made extended trav£ls to 
the Orient, and returning (Polo returned, 1295) described la a 
wondering Europe the new lands and peoples they had seen. The 
Voyages of Polo and the Travels of Mandeville were widely read. 
By the beginning of the fourteenth century the compass had been 
perfected, in Naples, and a great era of exploration had been be- 
gun. In 1402 venturesome sailors, out beyond the "Pillars of 
Hercules," discovered the Canary Islands; in 1419 the Madeira 
Islands were reached; in 1460 the Cape Verde Islands were found; 
in 1497 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the southern tip of Africa; 
and in 1497 Vasco da Gama discovered the long-hoped-for sea 
route to India, Five years earlier, sailing westward with the 
same end in view, Columbus discovered the American conti- 
nent. Finally, in 1519-22, Magellan's ships circumnavigated 
the globe, and, returning safely to Spain, proved that the world 
was round. In 1507 Waldenseem tiller published his Introduc- 
tion to Geography, a book that was widely read, and one which 
laid the foundations of this modern study. 

The effect of these discoveries in broadening the minds of men 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 259 

can be imagined. The religious theories and teachings of the 
Middle Ages as to the world were in large part upset. New races 
and new peoples had been found, a round earth instead of a flat 
one had been proved to exist, new continents had been discovered, 
and new worlds were now ready to be opened up for scientific ex- 
ploration and colonization. 

About 1500 a stimulating time. The latter part of the fifteenth 
century and the earlier part of the sixteenth was a stimulating 
periodin the intellectual development of Christian Europe. The 
Turks had closed in on Constantinople (1453) and ended the 
Eastern Empire, and many Greek scholars had fled to the West. 
Though the Revival of Learning had culminated in Italy, its in- 
fluence was still strongly felt in such cities as Florence and Venice, 
while in German lands and in England the reform movement 
awakened by it was at its height. Greek and Hebrew were now 
taught generally in the northern universities. Everywhere the 
old scholastic learning and methods were being overturned by 
the new humanism, and scholastic teachers were being displaced 
from their positions in the universities and schools. The new hu- 
nianistic university at Wittenberg, founded in 1502, was exerting 
large influence among German scholars and attracting to it the 
brightest young minds in German lands. Erasmus was the great- 
est international scholar of the age, though ably seconded by dis- 
tinguished humanistic scholars in Italy, France, England, the Low 
Countries, and German lands. The court schools of Italy (R. 135) 
and the municipal colleges of France (R. 136) were marking out 
new lines in the education of the select few. Colet was founding 
his reformed grammar school (15 10) at Saint Paul's, in London 
(R. 138), the first of a long line of Enghsh humanistic grammar 
schools. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo were 
adding new fame to Italy, and carrying the Renaissance move- 
ment over into that art which the world has ever since treasured 
and admired. 

The Italian cities, particularly Genoa and Venice, had become 
rich from their commerce, as had many cities in northern lands. 
Everywhere the cities were centers for the new life in western 
Christendom. England was rapidly changing from an agricul- 
tural to a manufacturmg nation. The serf was evolving into a 
free man all over western Europe. Italian navigators had dis- 
covered new sea routes and lands, and robbed the ocean of its ter- 
rors. Columbus had discovered a new world, soon to be peopled 



26o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and to become the home of a new civiHzation. Magellan had 
shown that the world was round and poised in space, instead of 
flat and surrounded by a circumfluent ocean. The printing-press 
had been perfected and scattered over Europe, and was rapidly 
multiplying books and creating a new desire to read (R. 134). 
The Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been in 
the past, or soon was to be for centuries to come. All of these 
new influences and conditions combined to awaken thought as 
had not happened before since the days of ancient Rome. The 
world seemed about ready for rapid advances in many new direc- 
tions, and great progress in learning, education, government, art, 
commerce, and invention seemed almost within grasp. Un- 
fortunately the promise was not to be fulfilled, and the progress 
that seemed possible in 1500 was soon lost amid the bitterness 
and hatreds engendered by a great religious conflict, then about 
to break, and which was destined to leave, for centuries to come, a 
legacy of intolerance and suspicion in all lands. 



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. In what way was the fact that Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in Italian 
instead of Latin an evidence of large independence? 

2. Was it a good thing for peace and civiHzation that the modern languages 
arose, instead of all speaking and writing Latin? Why? 

3. Of what value to one is a "sense of the past behind him, and a conception 
of the possibiUties of the future before him," by way of giving perspective 
and self-confidence? Do we have many mediaeval- type people to-day? 

4. Show how the work of Petrarch required a man with a strong historic 
sense. 

5. Show the awakening of the modern scientific spirit in the critical and 
reconstructive work of the scholars of the Revival. 

6. Of what was the exposure of the forgery of the "Donation of Constan- 
tine" a precursor? 

7. Contrast the modern and the mediaeval spirit as related to learning. 

8. Suppose that we should unexpectedly unearth in Mexico a vast literature 
of a very learned and scholarly people who once inhabited the United 
States, and should discover a key by which to read it. Would the 
interest awakened be comparable with that awakened by the revival of 
Greek in Italy? Why? 

9. What does the fact that no copy of Quintih'an's Institutes, a very famous 
Roman book, was known in Europe before 1416 indicate as to the de- 
struction of books during the early Christian period? 

[O. What does the fact that the Christians knew little about Greek literature 
or scholarship for centuries, and that the awakening was in large part 
brought about by the pressure of the Turks on the Eastern Empire, 
indicate as to intercourse among Mediterranean peoples during the 
Middle Ages? 

:i. How do you explain the fact that the recovery of the ancient learning 



THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 261 

was very largely the work of young men, and that older professors in 
the universities frequently held aloof from any connection with the 
movement? 

12. Compare the financial support of the Revival in Italy with the support 
of universities and of scientific undertakings in America during recent 
times. 

13. Explain the long-delayed interest in the Revival in the northern countries. 

14. Trace the larger steps in the transference of Greek literature and learn- 
ing from Athens, in the fifth century B.C., to its arrival at Harvard, in 
Massachusetts, in 1636. 

15. What was the importance of the rediscovery of Hebrew? 

16. Show how the invention of printing was a revolutionary force of the 
first magnitude. 

17. Why should a hcense from the Church have been necessary to print a 
book? Have we any remaining vestiges of this church control over 
books? 

18. Do you see any special reason why Venice should have become the early 
center of the book trade? 

19. Show how the printing-press became "a formidable rival to the pulpit 
and the sermon, and one of the greatest instruments for human progress 
and liberty." 

20. One writer has characterized the Revival of Learning as the beginnings 
of the emergence of the individual from institutional control, and the 
substitution of the humanities for the divinities as the basis of education. 
Is this a good characterization of a phase of the movement? 

21. Counting each edition of a printed book at only three hundred copies, 
how many volumes had been printed before 1 500 at the places listed in 
footnote 3, page 257? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

125. Petrarch: On copying a Work of Cicero. 

126. Benvenuto: Boccaccio's Visit to the Library at Monte Cassino. 

127. Symonds: Finding of QuintiHan's Institules at Saint Gall. 

(o) Letter of Poggio Bracciolini on the "Find." 
{b) Reply of Lionardo Bruni. 

1 28. MS. : Reproducing Books before the Days of Printing. 

129. Symonds: Italian Societies for studying the Classics. 

130. Vespasiano: Founding of the JNIedicean Library at Florence. 

131. Vespasiano: Founding of the Ducal Library at Urbino. 

132. Vespasiano: Founding of the Vatican Library at Rome. 

133. Green: The New Learning at Oxford. 

134. Green: The New Taste for Books. 

• QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Is it probable that Petrarch's explanation (125) of why many of the 
older Latin books were copied so infrequently, psalters being preferred 
instead, is correct? 

2. How do you explain the later neglect of so valuable a library as that at 
Monte Cassino (126) or Saint Gall (127 a)? 

3. Was Lionardo Bruni's letter to_Poggio (127 b) overdrawn? 



262 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

4. Was there anything unnatural about the work and customs of the Italian 
societies for studying the classics (129)? Compare with a modern lit- 
erary or scientific society, or with the National Dante Society. 

5. What does the extract from Vespasiano, telling how he got books for 
Cosimo de' Medici (130), indicate as to the scarcity of books in Italy 
toward the middle of the fifteenth century? 

6. The library of the Duke of Urbino (131) was the most complete collected 
up to that time. List the larger classifications of the books copied, as 
to the lines represented in a great library of that day. 

7. What does the work of Pope Nicholas V, in establishing the Vatican 
Library (132), indicate as to his interest in the new humanistic move- 
ment? 

8. Show from the selection from Green (133) that the revival movement in 
England was essentially a religious revival. 

9. Explain Green's cause-and-effect theory, as given in selection 134. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

* Adams, G. B. Civilizalion during the Middle Ages. 

Blades, William. William Caxton. 

Duff, E. G. Early Printed Books. 
*Field, Lilian F. introduction to the Study of the Renaissance. 
*Howells, W. D. Venetian Days (Venetian commerce). 
*Keane, John. The Evolution of Geography. 

La Croix, Paul. The Arts in the Middle Ages and at the Period of the 
Renaissance. 
*Loomis, Louise. MedicBval Hellenism. 

Ohphant, Mrs. Makers of Venice. 
*Robinson, J. H., and Rolfe, H. W. Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and 
Man of Letters. 

Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 11. 
*Sandys, J. E. Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning. 

Scaife, W. B. Florentine Life during the Renaissance. 

Sedgwick, H. D. Italy in the Thirteenth Century. 
*Symonds, J. A. The Renaissance in Italy; vol. 11, The Revival of Learning. 

Thorndike, Lynn. History of Medieval Europe. 

Whitcomb, M. Source Book of the Italian Renaissance. 
*Walsh, Jas. J. The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries. 



CHAPTER XI 

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL OF 
LEARNING 

Significance of the Revival of Learning. It is often stated that 
the roots of all our modem educational practices in secondary- 
education lie buried deep in the great Italian Revival of Learning. 
If we limit the statement to the time preceding the middle of the 
nineteenth century we shall be more nearly correct, as tremendous 
changes in both the character and the purpose of secondary edu- 
cation have taken place since that time. The important and out- 
standing educational result of the revival of ancient learning by 
Italian scholars was that it laid a basis for a new type of education 
below that of the university, destined in time to be much more 
widely opened to promising youths than the old cathedral and 
monastic schools had been. This new education, based on the 
great intellectual inheritance recovered from the ancient world by 
a relatively small number of Italian scholars, dominated the sec- 
ondary-school training of the middle and higher classes of society 
for the next four hundred years. It clearly began by 1450, it 
clearly controlled secondary education until at least after 1850. 
Out of die efforts of Italian scholars to resurrect, reconstruct, im- 
derstand, and utilize in education the fruits of their legacy from 
the ancient Greek and Roman world, arose modem secondary 
education, as contrasted with mediaeval church education. 

Mediaeval education, after all, was narrowly technical. It 
prepared for but one profession, and one type of service. There 
was little that was liberal, cultural, or humanitarian about it. It 
prepared for the world to come, not for the world men live in here 
The new education developed in Italy aimed to prepare directl} 
for life in the world here, and for useful and enjoyable life at that. 
Combining with the new humanistic (cultural) studies the best 
ideals and practices of the old chivalric education — physical 
training, manners and courtesy, reverence — the Italian pioneers 
devised a scheme of education, below that of the universities, 
which they claimed prepared youths not only for an intellectual 
appreciation of the great and wonderful past of which they were 
descendants, but also for intelligent service in the two great non- 



264 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



church occupations of Italy in the fifteenth century — pubHc 
service for the City-State, and commerce and a business life. 
This new type of education spread to other lands, and a new 
type of secondary-school training, actuated by a new and a 
modem purpose, thus came out of the revival of learning in Italy. 
The movement in Italy patriotic. The inspiration for the re- 
vival of learning in Italy did not originate with the universities. 

Even the new chairs when 
estabhshed in the universities 
were regarded as inferior, and, 
in true university fashion, the 
occupants were tolerated by 
the other professors rather 
than approved of by them. 
Some of the universities — 
Pavia and Bologna, in partic- 
ular — had practically noth- 
ing to do with the new move- 
ment.^ Even in the rich and 
learned city of Florence, the 
head and front of the revival 
movement, the church schol- 
ars and many university men 
took little or no part in the 
restoration of the old studies. 
The learned archbishop. Saint 
Antoninus, who presided over 
the cathedral at Florence dur- 
ing the brightest days of that 
city's history, pursued his 
mediaeval scholastic instruction undisturbed, and even wrote a 
Sumnia Thcologiae of his own. 

The revival movement, on the contrary, was directed in its 
beginnings by a small group of patriotic Italians possessed of a 
modem spirit, and was financed by intelligent and patriotic mer- 
chants, bankers, and princes. Surrounded on all sides by monu- 
ments and remains testifying to Roman greatness, and with 

1 Much as universities have contributed to intellectual progress, hostility to 
new t>T)es of thinking and to new subjects of study has been, through all time, a 
characteristic of many of their members, and often it has required much pressure 
from progressive forces on the outside to overcome their opposition to new lines of 
scholarship and public service. 




76. Saint Antoninus and ms 
Scholars 

Saint Antoninus (1389-1459) was the 
learned and pious Archbishop of Florence 
from 1446 until his death. The picture of 
liim giving instruction is from the Venice 
(1503) edition of his Sumnia Thcologiae. 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 265 

Roman speech in constant use by the scholars of the Church, the 
revival of Latin literature meant more to Italian scholars than to 
those of any other country. It seemed to them still possible to 
revive Roman life and make Roman speech once more the lan- 
guage of the learned world. The revival of Latin literature, too, 
meant much more to them than the revival of Greek. The chief 
vaiue of the latter was to open up a still greater past, and through 
this to illuminate Roman life and literature. After about 1500 
the enthusiasm for Greek rapidly died out in Italy, and the fur- 
ther interpretation of Greek life and thought was left to the 
northern nations. 

In this effort to revive the old Roman world the Italian scholars 
received the sympathy of the great men of wealth, and of some of 
the popes of the time. It was the Medici family at Florence who 
aided the movement 1 iberally~tRere7rejuvenated the university of 
Florence along new humanistic lines, accumulated libraries there 
(R. 130) and at Venice, and aided scholars all over Italy. At 
Milan the Visconti family paid the expenses of a chair of Latin 
and Greek, established in the university there in 1440. Popes 
Nicholas V and Leo X were prodigal in their support of the new 
learning at Rome (R. 132), and the university there was recon- 
structed along modem lines. At Venice the rulers gave large 
financial and other support to the leaders of the new learning. 
Academies (R. 129), under the patronage of the nobility, were 
founded in almost all the northern Italian cities, and those in po- 
litical power did much to make their cities notable centers for 
classical studies. 

New schools created. T he ^' fin ds" began with Petrarch's dis- 
covery of two orations of Cicero, in 1333, and by the time "the 
century of finds" (1333-1433) was drawing to a close the mate- 
rials^or a new type of secondary education had been accumulated. 
Not only was the old literature discovered and edited, but the 
finding of a complete copy of Quintihan's Institutes of Oratory at 
Saint Gall (R. 127), in 1416, gave a detailed explanation of the old 
Roman theory of education at its best. A number of "court 
schools" now arose in the different cities, to which children from 
the nobility and the banking and merchant classes were sent to 
enjoy the advantages they offered over the older types of religious 
schools. 

Two of the most famous teachers in these court schools were 
Vittorino da Feltre, who conducted a famous school at Mantua 



266 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



from 1423 to 1446, and Guarino da Verona, who conducted an- 
other almost equally famous school at Ferrara from 1429 to 1460. 
Taking boys at nine or ten and retaining them until twenty or 
twenty-one, their schools were much like the best private board- 
ing-schools of England and America to-day. Drawing to them a 





Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) 

(Drawn from a photograph of a con 

temporary painting. School 

at Ferrara, 14 29- 1460) 



VlTTORINODA FeLTRE (1378-1446) 

(Drawn from a medaUion in the 

British Museum. School at 

Mantua, 1423-46) 



Fig. 77. Two Early Italian Humanist Educators 

sslected class of students; emphasizing physical activities, man- 
ners, and morals; employing good teaching processes; and provid- 
ing the best instruction the world had up to that time known — 
the influence of these court schools was indeed large. Many of 
the most distinguished leaders in Church and State and some of 
the best scholars of the time were trained in them. By better 
methods they covered, in shorter time, as much or more than was 
provided in the Arts course of the universities, and so became ri- 
vals of them. The ultimate result was that, with the evolution of 
a series of secondary schools which prepared for admission to the 
universities, the gradual "humanizing" of the universities, and 
the introduction of printed textbooks, the Arts courses in the 
universities were advanced to a much higher plane. We have 
here one of the first of a number of subsequent steps by means of 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 267 

vvhich new knowledge, organized into teaching shape, has been 
passed on down to lower schools to teach, while the universities 
have stepped forward into new and higher fields of endeavor. 

The humanistic course of study. The new instruction was 
based on the study of Greek and Latin, combined with the courtly 
ideal and with some of the physical activities of the old chivalric 
education. Latin was begun with the first year in school, and the 
regular Roman emphasis was placed on articulation and proper 
accent. After some facility in the language had been gained, easy 
readings, selected from the greatest Roman writers, were at- 
tempted. As progress was made in reading and writing and 
speajdng.LMin as a living language, Cicero and Quintilian among 
prose writers, and Vergil, Lucan, Horace, Seneca, and Claudian 
among the poets, were read and studied. History was introduced 
in these schools for the first time and as a new subject of study, 
though the history was the history of Greece and Rome and was 
drawn from the authors studied. Livy and Plutarch were the 
chief historical writers used. Nothing that happened after the 
fall of Rome was deemed as of importance. Much emphasis was 
placed on manners, morality, and reverenceV^rth Livy and Plu- 
tarch again as the great guides to conduct. Throughout all this 
the use of Latin as a living language was insisted upon; declama- 
tion became a fine art; and the ability to read, speak, and com- 
pose in Latin was the test. Cicero, in particular, because of the 
exquisite quality of his Latin style, became the great prose model. 
Quintilian was the supreme authority on the purpose and method 
of teaching (R. 25). Greek also was begun later, tliough studied 
much less extensively and thoroughly. The Greek grammar of 
Theodorus Gaza (p. 248) was studied, followed by the reading of 
Xenophon, Isocrates, Plutarch, and some of Homer and Hesiod. 

This thorough drill in ancient history and literature was given 
along with careful attention to manners and moral training, and 
each pupil's health was watchfully supervised — an absolutely 
"new thought in the Christian world. Such physical sports and 
games as fencing, wrestling, playing ball, football, running, leap- 
ing, and dancing were also given special emphasis. Competitive 
games between different schools were held, much as in modern 
times. 

The result was an all-round physical, mental, and moral train- 
ing, vastly superior to anything previously offered by the cathe- 
dral and other church schools, and which at once established a 



268 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



new type which was widely copied. A number of these new 
teachers, called humanists, wrote treatises on the proper order of 
studies, the methods to be employed, the right education of a 
prince, liberal education, and similar topics.^ One of these, Bat- 
tista Guarino, describing the education provided in the school 
which his father founded at Ferrara (R. 135), laid down a dictum 
which was accepted widely until the middle of the nineteenth 
century, when he wrote : 

I have said that abihty to write Latin verse is one of the essential 
marks of an educated person. I wish now to indicate a second, which 
is of at least equal importance, namely, familiarity with the literature 
and language of Greece. The time has come when we must speak in 
no uncertain voice upon this vital requirement of scholarship. 

"^Humanism in France. From Italy the new humanism was 
carried to France, along with the retreating armies that had occu- 
pied Naples, Florence, and Milan (p. 252), and when Francis I 
came to the French throne, in 15 15, the new learning found in 
him a willing patron. Though there had been beginnings before 
this, the new learning really found a home in France now for the 

first time. Here, too, it became asso- 
ciated with court and noble, and the 
schools created to furnish this new 
instruction were provided at the insti- 
gation of some form of public author- 
ity. The greatest humanistic scholar in 
France at the time, Budaeus, was made 
royal librarian, in 1522. His study of 
the old Roman coinage, upon which he 
spent nine years, would pass to-day as 
a study representing a high grade of 
scholarship, and was in marked con- 
trast with the scholastic methods of the 
university. In his writings Budaeus set 
forth for France the dictum that every 
man, even if he be a king, should be devoted to letters and liberal 
learning, and that this culture can be obtained only through Greek 
and Latin, and of tliese, unlike the Italians, he held Greek to be 
the more important. Other scholars now helped to transfer the 
center for Greek scholarship to Paris, where it remained for the 
next two centuries. 

^ For a list of these treatises, see Monroe's Cyclopedia of EducatioH,voL v, p. 154. 




Fig. 78. GuiLLAUME 
BuD^us (1467-1540) 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 269 




College de France 



Founded at Paris, in 1530, by King Francis I. for 
instruction in the new humanistic learning 



A royal press was set up in Paris, in 1526, to promote the in- 
troduction of the new learning. Libraries were built up, as in 
Italy. Humanist scholars were made secretaries and ambassa- 
dors. The College de France was established at Paris, by direc- 
tion of the King, with 
chairs in Latin, Greek, 
Hebrew, and mathe- 
matics. To Hebrew 
the Italians had given 
almost no attention, 
but in France, and 
particularly in Ger- 
many, Hebrew be- 
came an important 
study. The devel- 
opment of schools in 
northern France wa.'i 
hindered by the dis- 
sensions following the 
religious revolts of Luther and Calvin, but in southern France 
many of the cities founded municipal colleges, much like the court 
schools of northern Italy in type. The work of the city of Bor- 
deaux in reorganizing its town school along the new lines was 
typical of the work of other southern cities. Good teachers, lib- 
eral instruction, and a broad-minded attitude on the part of the 
governing authorities ' made this school, known as the College de 
Guyenne, notable not only for humanistic instruction, but for 
intelligent public education during the second half of the six- 
teenth century. The picture of this college (school) left us by 
its greatest principal, Elie Vinet (R. 136), gives an interesting 
description of its work. 

Humanism in Germany. The French language and life was 
closely related to that of northern Italy, and French religious 
thought had always been so closely in touch with that of Rome 
that something of the Italian feeling for the old Roman culture 
and institutions was felt by the humanists of France. In Ger- 
many and England no such feeling existed, and in these countries 
any effort to discredit the rising native languages was much more 
likely to be regarded as mere pedantry. In both these countries, 
though, Latin was still the language of the Church, of the univer- 

^ The distinguished author, Montaigne, was mayor in 1580. 



270 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



sities, of all learned writing, and the means of international inter- 
course, and after the new humanism had once obtained a foothold 
it was welcomed by scholars as a great addition to existing knowl- 
edge. Erasmus, the foremost scholar of his day, not only labored 
hard to introduce the new learning in the schools, but welcomed 
the restored Roman tongue as an international language for schol- 
arship, as a potent weapon for destroying barriers of language, re- 
ligion, law, and possibly in time governments based on national- 
ity, and for the promise it gave of peace in international relation- 
ships. In both Germany and England, in place of the patriotic 
fervor of the ItaHans, religious zeal, as we shall see later on, was 
kindled by the new humanistic studies. 

Among the universities Vienna, Heidelberg, Erfurt, Tubingen, 
and Leipzig (see Figure 6i) were foremost in the introduction of 
the new learning. Erfurt became the center of a group of human- 
istic scholars during the closing years of the fifteenth century, and 
the first Greek book printed in Germany 
appeared there, in 1 501 . At both Tubingen 
and Heidelberg Reuchlin (p. 254) taught 
for a time, and both institutions early be- 
came centers for the study of Latin, Greek, 
and Hebrew. At Leipzig the reigning duke 
brought various humanistic scholars to th? 
university to lecture, after 1507, and in 
1 5 19 entirely reformed the university by 
subordinating the mediaeval disciplines to 
the new studies. Four new universities 
— Wittenberg (1502), Marburg (1527), 
Konigsberg (1544), and Jena (1558) — 
were established on the new humanistic 
"Father of modern Hebrew basis, and from their beginning were cen- 
Studies " ^gj.g £^j. ^g j^g^ learning. At Wittenberg, 

Martin Luther had been made Professor of Theology, in 1508, 
when but twenty-five years of age, and to Wittenberg the Elec- 
toral Prince, in 15 18, brought the young Melanchthon, then but 
twenty-one, as Professor of Greek. The universities of Germany 
were more profoundly affected by the introduction of the new 
learning than were those of any other country. The monastic 
orders and the Scholastics, who had for long controlled the Ger- 
man institutions, were overthrown by the aid of the ruling 
princes, and by the close of the first quarter of the sixteenth 




Fig. 80. JoHANN 

Reuchlin (1455-152 2) 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 271 

century the new humanism was everywhere triumphant in Ger- 
man lands. 

German secondary schools. The enthusiasm of the human- 
ists for the new learning led them to urge the establishment of 
humanistic secondary schools in the German cities. The schools 
of "The Brethren of the Common Life" (Hieronymians) , a teach- 
ing order founded by Gerhard Grote at Deventer, Holland, in 
1384, and which had established forty-five houses by the time the 
new learning came into the Netherlands from Italy, at once 
adopted the new studies, soon trebled the number of its houses, 
and for decades supphed teachers of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to 
all the surrounding countries.^ Wessel, Agricola, Hegius, Reuch- 
lin, and Sturm were among their greatest teachers, and Erasmus 
their greatest pupil. Here and there in German cities Latin 
schools, teaching the subjects of the Trivium, but principally the 
elements of Latin and grammar, had been estabUshed in the 
course of the later Middle Ages, and to these scholars trained in 
the new learning gradually made their way, secured employment, 
and thus quietly introduced a purified Latin and the intellectual 
part of the new humanistic course of study. Up to 1520 this 
method was followed entirely in German lands. 

As in Italy, the commercial cities were among the first to pro- 
vide schools of the new type. In 1526 the commercial city of 
Nuremberg, in southern Germany, opened one of the first of the 1 
new city humanistic secondary schools, Melanchthon being/ 
present and giving the dedicatory address. A number of similar 
schools were founded about this time in various German cities — ■ 
Ilfeld, Frankfort, Strassburg, Hamburg, Bremen, Dantzig — 
among the number. Many of these failed, as did the one at Nu- 
remberg, to_meet the needs of the people in essentially ^commer- 
cial cities. Whatever might have been true in more cultured 
Italy, in German cities a rigidly classical training for youth and 
early manhood was found but poorly suited to the needs of the 
sons of wealthy burghers destined to a commercial career. The 
rising commerce of the world apparently was to rest on native 
languages, and not on elegant Latin verse and prose. The com- 
mercial classes soon fell back on burgher schools, elementary 
vernacular schools, writing and reckoning schools, business ex- 

1 This order had begun as an institution for the instruction of the poor, emphasiz- 
ing the use of the Bible and the vernacular, but when the new learning came in from 
Italy, classical learning was added and the instruction of the brotherhood became 
largely humanistiu 



272 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



perience, and travel for the education of their sons, leaving the 
Latin schools of the humanists to those destined for the service of 
the Church, the law, teaching, or the higher state service. 

The Work of Johann Sturm. The most successful classical 
school in all Germany, and the one which formed the pattern for 

future classical creations, was 
the gymnasium ^ at Strassburg, 
under the direction (1536-82) 
of the famous Johann Sturm, 
or Sturmius, as he came to call 
himself. This was one of the 
early classical schools founded 
by the commercial cities, but 
it had not been successful. In 
1536 the authorities invited 
Sturm, a graduate of the Uni- 
versity of Louvain, and at that 
time a teacher of classics and 
dialectic at Paris, where he 
had come in contact with the 




Fig. 81. Johann Sturm (1507-89) 

(After a contemporary engraving by 
Stofflin) 



humanism brought from Italy, 
to become head of the school 
and reorganize it. This he 
did, and during the forty-five 
years he was head of the school it became the most famous 
classical school in continental Europe. His Plan of Organization, 
published in 1538; his Letters to the Masters on the course of 
study, in 1565; and the record of an examination of each class 

1 The influence of the old Greek classical terms in this connection is interesting, 
and is another evidence of the permanence of Greek ideas. Sturm here adopted 
the Italian nomenclature, Vittorino da Feltre having called his school a Gymnasium 
Palatlniim-, or Palace School. Guarino wrote of gymnasia Italorum. Both derived 
the term from the Gymnasia of ancient Greece, just as the academies of the Italian 
cities took their name from the Academy of Plato at Athens (p. 44). Another 
famous Greek school was the Lyceum, founded by Aristotle (p. 44). All these 
names came in during the Revival of Learning in Italy, and were applied to the new 
classical schools at a time when every term, and even the names of men, were given 
classical form. As a result the Italian secondary schools of to-day are known as 
ginnasio, and the German classical secondary schools as gymnasia. The French 
took their term from the Lyceum, hence the French lycees. The English named their 
classical schools after the chief subject of study, hence the English grammar schools. 
In 1638 Milton visited Italy, and was much entertained in Florence by members of 
the academy and university there. In 1644 he published his Tractate on Education, 
in which he outlined his plan for a series of classical academies for England. Milton 
was a church reformer, as were the Puritans, and the Puritans, in settling America, 
brought over first the term grammar school, and later the term academy to New 
England. 



M 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 273 

in the school, conducted in 1578, all of which have been pre- 
served, give us a good idea as to the nature of the organ- 
ization and instruction (R. 137). 

Sturm was a strong and masterful man, with a genius for or- 
ganization. Probably adopting the plan of the French colleges 
(R. 136), he organized his school into ten classes,^ one for each 
year the pupil was to spend in the school, and placed a teacher in 
charge of each. The aim and end of education, as he stated it, 
was "piety, knowledge, and the art of speaking," and "every 
effort of teachers and pupils" should bend toward acquiring 
"knowledge, and purity and elegance of diction." Of the ten 
years the pupil was to spend in the gymnasium, seven were to be 
spent in acquiring a thorough mastery of pure idiomatic Latin, 
and the three remaining years to the acquisition of an elegant 
style. Cicero was the great model, but Vergil, Plautus, Terence, 
Martial, Sallust, Horace, and other authors were read and stud- 
ied. Except that the Catechism was first studied in the native 
German, Latin was made the language of the classroom. Great 
emphasis was placed on letter-writing, declamation, and the act- 
ing of plays. Rhetoric, too, was made a very important subject 
of study. Greek was begun in the fifth year of school and con- 
tinued throughout, all instruction in Greek being given through 
the medium of the Latin.- The instruction in both Latin and 
Greek was much like that of the court schools of Italy, except 
that in Greek the New Testament was read in addition. The 
plays and games and physical training of the Italian schools, how- 
ever, were omitted; much less emphasis was placed on manners 
and gentlemanly conduct; and in educational purpose a narrow 
drill was substituted for the broad cultural spirit of the French 
and Italian schools. 

Sturm was the greatest and most successful schoolman of his 
day. In clearly defined aim, thorough organization, carefully 
graded instruction, good teaching, and sound scholarship, his 
school surpassed all others. Sturm's aim was to train pious, 
learned, and eloquent men for service in Church and State, using 
religion and the new learning as means, and in this he was very 
successful. In a short time after taking charge his gymnasium 

^ Melanchthon, in his famous Saxony plan of 1528, had provided for but three 
classes (R. 161). The class-for-each-year idea was new in German lands. 

^ This became a fixed practice, Latin being the one language of the school. A 
century later, when it was attempted by the Jansenists, in France, to teach Greek 
directly through the vernacular, the practice was loudly condemned by the Jesuits 
as impious, because it broke the connection betweenJFrance and Rome. 



274 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



had SLX hundred pupils, and in 1578 there were "thousands ot 
pupils, representing eight nations," in attendance. Sturm be- 
came widely known throughout northern Europe, and scholars 
and princes passing through Strassburg stopped to visit his school 
and secure his advice. He corresponded with scholars in m.any 
lands, and the influence of his institution was enormous. He was 

the author of many school 
textbooks, and of half a dozen 
works on the theory and prac- 
tice of education. He fixed 
both the type and the name 
— gymnasium — of the Ger- 
man classical secondary school, 
which to-day is not very ma- 
terially changed from the form 
and character which Sturm 
gave it. Sturm's work deeply 
influenced many later foun- 
dations in Germany, and also 
helped to mould the educa- 
tional system devised later on 
by the Jesuits. 

Humanism in England. 
Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet 
had introduced the new learn- 
ing at Oxford, as we have al- 
ready seen (p. 253), in the 
closing years of the fifteenth 
century (R. 133), but had made but little impression. They 
were ably seconded by Erasmus, who taught Greek at Cambridge 
(15 10-14), 3-nd who labored hard to substitute true classical cul- 
ture for the poor Latin and the empty scholasticism of his time. 
He wrote textbooks ^ to help introduce the new learning, urged 
the importance of history, geography, and science as serving to 
elucidate the classics, edited editions of the classical authors, 

* His phreise book, De Copia Verborum el Rerum, went through sixty editions in 
his lifetime, and was popular for a century after his death. His book of proverbs, 
the Adagia, was in both Latin and Greek, and was widely used. His Book of Say- 
ings from the Ancients {A po phthcgmata) was a collection of little stories, much like 
some of our best modern books for elementary-school use. His Colloquies, or Latin 
dialogues, were widely used for two centuries in Protestant countries. These four 
were written between 1511 and 151Q, and largely for use in Saint Paul's School. His 
Latin edition of Theodorus Gaza's Greek Grammar (15 16) gave English schools 
for the first time a standard text. 




Fig. 82. Desiderius Er.\smus 
(1467-1536) 

A contemporary portrait by the German 

artist, Hans Holbein the Younger, 

in the Louvre, Paris 






EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 275 

wrote two treatises of importance on education/ and in two other 
books - ridiculed those who mistook the form for the spirit of 
the ancient learning. His Latin Greek edition of the New Tes- 
tament definitely fixed the place of the New Testament in the 
humanistic schools. 

In spite of the opposition of monks and scholastics in the uni- 
versities of Oxford and Cambridge, and in the face of the coming 
religious turmoil in the days of Henry VIII, the new learning 
made steady progress in the universities,^ with the court, and 
among the scholars and statesmen of the time. With the coming 
of Elizabeth to the throne,^ in 1558, the court, irom the Queen 
down,_was-Jmbued with the spirit of the new learning (R. 139). 
EUzabeth appointed new chancellors for the two universities, and 
these institutions were soon transformed from places for the 
training of mediaeval scholars and theologians into places for the 
production of a "due supply of fit persons to serve God in Church 
and State." As Sir Thomas Elyot so well expressed it, in his The 
Governour (1544) — a book on the education of rulers for a State, 
and which was permeated by the new spirit — '' the new political 
order requires quahfied instruments for its administration, and a 
trained governing class must henceforth take the place of the 
privileged caste and the clerk [cleric] education under the mediae- 
val disciphnes." ^^^ 

C^olet and Saint Paul's School. The first real estabhshment of 
the new learning in England came through the secondary schools, 
and through the refounding of the cathedral school of Saint 
Paul's, in London, by the Immajiist John Colet^ in 15 10. Colet 
had become Dean of Saint Paul's Church, and Erasmus urged him 
to embrace the opportunity to reconstruct the school along hu- 
manistic lines. This he did, endowing it with all his wealth, and 
in a series of carefully drawn-up Statutes (R. 138), which were 
widely copied in subsequent foundations, Colet laid special em- 
phasis on the school giving training in the new learning and in 

^ They were On the First Liberal Education of Children (1529), and On the Order of 
Study (1511). 

^ His Praise of Folly (1509), and his Ciceronian (1528). 

' The introduction of the new learning into the English universities was easier 
than elsewhere, because the English universities had broken up into groups of resi- 
dence halls, known as colleges. If the old colleges could not be reformed new ones 
could be created, and this took place. Trinity College, at Cambridge, founded in 
1540, was from the first a center of humanistic studies. That same year the King 
founded royal professorships of Civil Law, Hebrew, and Greek at Cambridge. 

* EHzabeth had had for her tutor Roger Ascham, author of The Scholemaster , and 
■*. teacher of Greek at Cambridge (R. 139). 



276 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Christian discipline. Erasmus gave much of his time for years to 
finding teachers and writing textbooks for the school. William 
Lily (1468-15 2 2), another early humanist recently returned from 
study in Italy, and the author of a widely known and much used 
textbook ^ — Lilys Latin Grammar (R. 140) — was made head- 
master of the school. 

The course of study was of the humanistic type already de- 
scribed, coupled with careful religious instruction. In place of 




Fig. 83. Saint Paul's School, London 

the monkish Latin pure Latin and Greek were to be taught, and 
the best classical authors took the place of the old mediaeval dis- 
ciplines. The school met with much opposition, was denounced 
as a temple of idolatry and heathenism by the men of the old 
schools, and even the Bishop of London tried twice to convict 
Colet of heresy and suppress the instruction. Notwithstanding 
this the school became famous for its work, not only in London 
but throughout England. From its desks came a long line of 
capable statesmen, learned clergy, brilliant scholars, and literary 
men. 



^ For generations this famous grammar was to England what Donatus was to 
mediaeval Europe. It was also used in the grammar schools of New England. Lily 
visited Jerusalem and studied under the best Latin teachers in Rome, so that he 
ranks with Linacre, Grocyn, and Colet as an introducer of classical culture into 
England. 






EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 2'j'j 

Influence on other English grammar schools. In a preceding 
chapter (p. 152) we mentioned the founding of many English 
grammar schools after 1200. At the time Saint Paul's School 
was refounded there were something like three hundred of these, 
of all classes, in England. They existed in connection with the 
old monasteries, cathedrals, collegiate churches, guilds, and char- 
ity foundations in connection with parish churches, while a few 
were due to private benevolence and had been founded independ- 
ently of either Church or State. The^Sevenoaks Grammar 
School, founded by the will of William Sevenoaks, in 1432 (R. 
141), and for which he stated in his will that he desired as master 
''an honest man, sufficiently advanced and expert in the science 




"^^^^B-^^^r^ 









k '' HI 








Fig. 84. GiGGLESWiCK Grammar School 

One of the chief schools of Yorkshire, England, and dating back to 1499. This 
building was erected in 1507-12 by a chantry priest named James Carr (Ker). 
Drawn from an old print. On the front of the building was a Latin tablet (shown in 
the drawing) , now in the British Museum, which, translated, read : " Kindly mother 
of God, defend James Ker from ill. For priests and young clerks this house is 
made, in 1512. Jesus, have mercy on us. Old men and children praise the name 
of the Lord." 

of Grammar, B.A., by no means in holy orders," and the chantry 
grammar school founded by John Percyvall, in 1503 (R. 142), are 
examples of the parish type. The famous Winchester Public 
School, founded by Bishop William of Wykeham, in 1382, to em- 
phasize grammar, reHgion, and manners, and to prepare seventy 



278 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

scholars for New College, at Oxford/ where they were to be 
trained as priests; and Eton College, founded by Henry VI, in 
1440, to prepare students for King's College, at Cambridge, are 
examples of the larger private foundations. A few, such as the 
grammar school at Sandwich (1579), owed their origin (R. 143) to 
the initiative of the city authorities. Most of these grammar 
schools were small, but a few were large and wealthy establish- 
ments. 

These old foundations, with their mediaeval curriculum, after a 
time began to feel the influence of Colet's school. Within a cen- 
tury, due to one influence or another, practically all had been re- 
modeled after the new classical type set up by Colet. In the 
course of study given for Eton (R. 144), for 1560, we see the new 
learning fully established, and in the course of study for a small 
country grammar school, in 1635 (R. 145), we see how fully the 
new learning, with its emphasis on Latin as a living language, had 
by this time extended to even the smallest of the English grammar 
schools. The new foundations, after 15 10, were almost entirely 
new-learning grammar schools, with large emphasis on grammar, 
good Latin and Greek, games and sports, and the rehgious spirit. 
One of the most conspicuous of these later foundations was Mer- 
chant Taylor's School,^ founded in London in 1561, and of which 
, Richard Mulcaster (1531-1611), the author of two important 
L' books on educational theory,^ was for long the headmaster. The 
Ifirst American Latin grammar school (Boston, 1635) was a direct 
\ descendant of these English influences and traditions. 

The reaction against mediaevalism. Having traced the intro- 
duction of the new learning by countries, it still remains to point 
out certain significant educational features of the movement 

1 Winchester was the first of the so-called "great public schools" of England, of 
which Eton, Saint Paul's, Westminster, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Shrewsbury, 
and Merchant Taylors' are the other eight. The foundation statutes of Winchester 
made elaborate provision for "a Warden, a Head Master, ten Fellows, three Chap- 
lains, an Usher, seventy scholars, three Chapel Clerks, sixteen Choristers, and a 
large staff of servants," as did Henry VHI later on for Canterbury (R. 172 a). The 
Warden and Fellows were the trustees. In addition to the seventy scholars (Foun- 
dationers) other non-foundationers (Commoners) were to^be admitted to instruction. 
The admission requirements were to be "reading, plain song, and Old Donatus," 
and the school was to teach Grammar, the first of the Liberal Arts. Except for the 
change in the nature of the instruction when the new learning came in, this and the 
other "public schools" remained almost unchanged until the second half of the nine- 
teenth century. 

" Statutes for this school had provided the following entrance regulations: "But 
first see that they can the Catechisme in English or Latyn, that every one of the 
said two hundred & fifty schollers can read perfectly & write competently, or els 
lett them not be admitted in no wise." 

* His The Positions (1581), and The Elementarie (1582). See Chapter xviii. 





=s ( 



Plate 5. Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School 

Established by the Holy Cross Guild of Stratford-on-Avon, at the beginning of the 
fifteenth century. The Grammar School was built in 1426, of wood, and at a cost 
of £10, S5-, ,^ }4d. The school was held on the upper floor, the lower being used as a 
guild-hall. Here Shakespeare went to school, and saw companies of strolling players 
in the hall below. The lower picture shows the grammar-school room after its 
"restoration," in 1892. 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 279 

which were common In all lands, and which profoundly modified 
subsequent educational practice. Both the purpose and the 
method of education were permanently changed. 

Up to about the middle of the fourth Christian century the aim 
of both Greek and Roman education had been to prepare men to 
become good and useful citizens in the State. Then the Church 
gained control of education, and for a thousand years the chief 
object was to prepare for the world to come. Success and good 
citizenship in this world counted for little, religious devotion took 
the place of the old state patriotism, the salvation of souls took the 
place of the promotion of the social welfare, and the aim and end 
of life here was to attain everlasting bhss in the world to come. 
To be able to appease the dread Judge at the Day of Judgment, 
prayer, penance, and holy contemplation were the important 
things here below. It was preeminently the age of the self abas- 
ing monk, and this mental attitude dominated all thinking and 
learning. 

The spirit behind the Revival of Learning was a protest against 
this mediaeval attitude, and the protest was vigorous and success- 
ful. The Revival of Learning was a clear break with mediaeval 
traditions and with mediaeval authority. It restored to the world 
the ideals of earlier education — self-culture, and preparation for 
usefulness and success in the world here. In Italy, France, Ger- 
many, and England the movement, too, met with the most thor- 
ough approval from modern men — merchants, court officials, 
and scholars who were ready to break with the mediaeval type of 
thinking. The court and other types of secondary schools now 
established were popular with the higher classes in society, and 
this aristocratic stamp the humanistic schools and courses have 
ever since retained. These schools restored to the world the prac- 
tical education of the days of Cicero, and preparation for intelli- 
gent service in the Church, State, and the larger business hfe be- 
came one of their important purposes. Supported as they were 
by the ruling classes, the new schools were close to the most pro- 
gressive forces in the national life of the different countries. They 
represented an unmistakable reaction against the world of the 
mediaeval monk and the Scholastic, and their early success was in 
large part because of this. 

Modification of the mediaeval curriculum. The mediaeval 
curriculum, as we have seen (chap, vii), was based on instruction 
in the Seven Liberal Arts. Grammar at first was the great sub- 



28o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ject, but later Dialectic became the master science. Knowledge 
was regarded as an organic whole, capable of being stated in a 
brief encyclopaedia, and each man could learn it all. With the 
rise of university instruction some new knowledge was added, 
chiefly from Moslem sources, and the old knowledge was minutely 
re-ground. With the revival of the ancient learning there came, 
within a little more than a century, an enormous increase in the 
world's sum of knowledge., and the invention of printing came 
just in time to multiply and scatter this new knowledge through- 
out western Europe. To all the old subjects a new wealth of de- 
tail was added which made teaching encyclopaedias impossible. 
New purposes in education now came to prevail, and the great 
mediaeval teaching curriculum was changed in content and in 
relative importance. 

Of the subjects in the old Trivium, Dialectic or Logic, which 
Scholastics had raised to the place of first importance, was de- 
throned, and relegated to a minor position in university instruc- 
tion. In its place Grammar, as Quintilian knew and used the 
term (R. 76) and as based on and including Literature, was raised 
once more to the place of first importance. Out of this, Litera- 
ture — at first the classical and later the modern — later came as 
a separate study, as did also the study of History and Mythology. 
By the latter part of the sixteenth century technical Grammar 
had been separated from Literature, and made a more elementary 
subject, while Rhetoric had developed into a critical study of lit- 
erary art. Of the subjects of the Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Geom- 
etry, and Astronomy were each greatly expanded, as a result of 
the introduction of much new knowledge, and each was reduced 
to textbook form, while Algebra and Trigonometry were now 
organized as teaching subjects. Due to their newness and diffi- 
culty these subjects were taught chiefly in the universities. There 
they remained for a long time before being passed down to the 
secondary schools. Out of the very elemental instruction given 
in Geography and Astronomy were in time evolved all the biologi- 
cal and physical sciences, though this development belongs to a 
later chapter (xvii), and these new subjects did not reach the 
secondary schools until well into the nineteenth century. The 
last of the quadrivial subjects, Music, experienced a different his- 
tory in different countries. In the Germanic countries it con- 
tinued to receive its old emphasis, while in England and France 
much less was made of it. After the setting-in of Puritanism 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 281 







Later Middle 
Ages 


Period of the Revival 
of Learning 


Later evolution 


C/2 

H 
< 

< 
W 

m 
1— 1 

> 

w 

W 


>■ 
2 

> 

Q 
< 


'GRAMMAR 

Rhetoric 
^Dialectic 


Grammar 

Rhetoric 
DIALECTIC 


GRAIvIMAR 

Rhetoric 
Dialectic 


( Grammar 

\ LITERATURE 

History 
I. Mythology 

Rhetoric 

Logic (To Univs.) 


Arithmetic 
Geometry 

Astronomy 
MUSIC 


Arithmetic 

[ Geometry 

[ Geography 
[ Astronomy 

[ Physics 
MUSIC 


Arithmetic 

Geometry 

Geography 
Astronomy 

Physics 


f Arithmetic 

[ Algebra 

J Geometry 

1 Trigonometry 

i Geography 

\ Botany, Zoology 

Astronomy, Me- 
chanics 

Physics, Chemistry 


«_ 




j In Teutonic Countries — Music 
\ In English Countries — ? 



Fig. 85. The Evolution of IModern Studies 

The great study of each period is in capitals; subjects in italics indicate that 
they also were quite important. Least important subjects in ordinary t>T3e 



in England, when music was regarded with great disfavor, it in 
large part passed out of the English curriculum. As a result the 
Germanic and Scandinavian nations are to-day singing nations, 
while the English and American are not. In early America, in par- 
ticular, was the religious reaction against music especially strong. 
New teaching methods. Such important changes naturally 
called for a progressively evolving series of printed textbooks, 
and these now came fast from the presses. The day of one text- 
book, which could dominate all instruction for hundreds of years, 
was over forever. A few books, such as Lily's or Melanchthon's 
Latin grammars and the textbooks of Erasmus, were still used for 
a long time, but throughout the sixteenth century, before the 
schools became formalized and lost their earlier purpose, each 
textbook issued was soon superseded by a better one. The inven- 
tion of printing, too, changed teaching from a reading-by-the- 
professor to a textbook method, and tremendously shortened the 
time necessary to give instruction in any subject. With the 
manufacture of paper the written theme, too, displaced the dis- 



282 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

putation, with great gains in accuracy of thinking and refinement 
in the use of words. It was still the Latin theme or verse or ora- 
tion, to be sure, and the object of the new instruction was to 
teach Latin as a living language, but before long the time was to 
come when the same methods would be transferred to instruction 
in the native tongues and for national ends. 

To make the instruction as practical as possible, and thus pre- 
pare the pupils for service as Latin scholars in public or scholarly 
pursuits, the ancient literature was studied in part as a storehouse 
of adequate and elegant expression, and numerous phrase books ^ 
were written for use in the schools. When we remember that 
Latin was still the language of all learned literature, of the univer- 
sity classroom, of most diplomatic and legal documents, and a 
practical necessity for travel or communication abroad, we can 
realize why so much emphasis was placed on the constant use of 
Latin as the language of the school.- As Leach ^ so well puts it: 

The learned professions required a competent knowledge of Latin 
far more directly then than now. A need for Latin was not confined 
to the Church and the priest. The diplomatist, the lawyer, the civil 
servant, the physician, the naturalist, the philosopher, wrote, read, and 
to a large extent spoke and perhaps thought in Latin. Nor was Latin 
only the language of the higher professions. A merchant, or a bailiff 
of a manor, wanted it for his accounts ; every town clerk or guild clerk 
wanted it for his minute book. Columbus had to study for his voyages 
in Latin; the general had to study tactics in it. The architect, the 
musician, every one who was neither a mere soldier nor a mere handi- 
craftsman, wanted, not a smattering of grammar, but a living acquaint- 
ance with the tongue, as a spoken as well as a written language. 

The schools become formal. After the new learning had ob- 
tained a firm footing in the schools there happened what has often 

^ Solomon Lowe, in his Grammar, published in 1726, gives a bibliography of 
128 Phrase Books which had appeared by that time. The following selection from 
the Colloquies of Corderius (R. 136) illustrates their nature: 

Col. 7. Clericiis, Col. 7. Clericus, 

The Master. Magister. 

C. Master, may not I and my uncle's Licetne, Magister, ut ego & patru61is 

son go home? edmus domom? 

M. To what end? Quid e6? 

C. To my sister's daughter's wedding. Ad nuptias consobrinae. 
M. When is she to be married? Quando est nuptura? 

C. To-morrow. Crastino die. 

M. Why will you go so quickly? Cur tarn cito vultis ire? 

C. To CHANGE OUR CLOATHS. Ut mulemus vestimenta. 

^ Sturm, Trotzendorf, and Neander insisted on the use of Latin in all conversa- 
'son in the school, and the Jesuits later on subjected boys to a whipping if reported 
%s having used the vernacular. 

^ Leach, A. F., English Schools at the Reformation, p. io<;. 



._ll 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 283 

happened in the history of new educational efforts — that is, the 
new learning became narrow, formal, and fixed, and lost the lib- 
eral spirit which actuated its earlier promoters. In the beginning 
the Italian humanists had aimed at large personal self-culture and 
individual development, and the northern humanists at moral 
and religious reform and preparation for useful service, both using 
the classics as a means to these new ends. After about 1500 in 
Italy, and 1600 in the northern countries, when the new-learning 
schools had become well established and thoroughly organized, 
the tendency arose to make the means an end in itself. Instead 
of using the classical literatures to impart a liberal education, give 
larger vision, and prepare for useful public service, they came- to 
be used largely for disciplinary ends. The teaching of Campion 
at Prague (1574) well illustrates this degeneracy (R. 146). This 
change alienated practical men from the schools. French now in 
turn became the language of the court and of diplomacy, and the 
work of the schools tended to be confined largely to preparing 
students to enter the universities or the service of the Church. 
Men of the world hence turned to a new type of schools which 
now arose (chapter xvii) , and which made preparation for social 
efficiency in a modern world their aim. 

In consequence the aim of the new humanistic education came 
in time to be thought of in terms of languages and literatures, in- 
stead of in terms of usefulness as a preparation for intelligent liv- 
ing, and educational effort was transferred from the larger human 
point of view of the early humanistic teachers to the narrower and 
much less important one of mastering Greek and Latin, writing 
verses, and cultivating a good (Ciceronian) Latin style. Sturm's 
school at Strassburg clearly shows the beginnings of such a trans- 
formation (R. 137). As Latin came to be less and less used by 
scholars in writing, passed out of use as the language of govern- 
ment and of international communication, was replaced by 
French as the language of polite society, and was gradually super- 
seded in the university lecture room by the vernaculars, the prac- 
tical motive for learning Latin died out, except for service in the 
Church, and the disciplinary and cultural value of the study of 
the classics alone remained. The disciplinary, being easier to 
give, and better within the understanding of most teachers, grad- 
ually won over the cultural. As a result, classical education 
gradually became narrow and fonnal, and drill in composition 
and declamation and imitation of the style of ancient authors — • 



284 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

particularly Cicero, whence the term " Ciceronianism " which came 
to be appHed to it — grew to be the ruhng motives in instruction. 
By the end of the sixteenth century this change had taken place 
in both the secondary schools and the universities, and this nar- 
row linguistic attitude continued to dominate classical education, 
in German lands until the mid-eighteenth, and in all other west- 
ern European countries and in America until near the middle of 
the nineteenth century. It was not until vigorously challenged 
by the enthusiasts for modern scientific studies that the teachers 
of the classics awoke to the need of improving their instruction 
and restoring something of the old cultural value to what they 
were teaching. 

The new learning in northern and western Europe was also 
much changed in character by the violent religious dissensions, 
following the Protestant Revolt, to a consideration of which we 
next turn. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Explain just what is meant by the statement that mediaeval education 
was narrowly technical. 

2. State the educational ideals of the new secondary schools evolved by the 
Italian humanistic scholars, and show whether these ideals have been 
best embodied in the German gymnasium or the EngUsh grammar school. 

3. How do you explain the merchants and bankers and princes of Italy 
being more interested in the revival-of-learning movement than the 
Church and university scholars? Do such classes to-day show the same 
type of interest in aiding learning? 

4. What was the particular importance of the recovery of Quintilian's 
Inslilutes? Of Cicero's Orations and Letters? 

5. What better methods could the Italian court schools have used to enable 
them to cover the university Arts course in shorter time? How would 
this have advanced the character of the instruction in Arts in the uni- 
versity? ' 

6. Show how the type of education developed in the Itahan court schools 
was superior to that of the best of the cathedral schools. To that devel- 
oped by Sturm. 

7. Show how the new type of secondary schools was naturally associated 
with court and nobility and men of large worldly affairs, and how in 
consequence the new secondary education became and for long con- 
tinued to be considered as aristocratic education. 

8. Explain how the terms college, lycee, gymnasium, academy, and grammar 
school all came to be employed, in different countries, to designate about 
the same type of secondary school. 

9. Had the purified Latin been restored, as the general international lan- 
guage of learning and government, would it have helped materially in 
bringing about the civilizing influences Erasmus saw in it? 

10. Has the development of separate nationalities and different national 
languages aided in advancing international peace and civihzation? 
Why? 



EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL 285 

11. Why should the new humanistic studies have developed religious fervor 
in Germany and England, in place of the patriotic fervor of the ItaHan 
scholars? 

12. Was the struggle against the introduction of the new learning into the 
German universities parallel to the late struggle against the introduc- 
tion of science into American universities? 

13. Contrast the aim of Sturm's school with that of the Italian court schools, 
and the Enghsh grammar schools. Point out the new tendencies in his 
work. 

14. Does the sentence quoted from Elyot's Governour express well the changed 
conditions in England at the middle of the sixteenth century? Do such 
changed conditions always demand educational reorganizations? 

15. What basis, if any, did the opponents of Colet's school have for denounc- 
ing it as a temple of idolatry and heathenism? 

16. Show how it was natural that the first American school should have been 
a Latin grammar school in type. 

17. Show that the new conception as to education, as expressed by the new 
humanism, found a public ready to support it. What was the nature of 
this public? 

18. Show how the new schools were "close to the most progressive forces in 
the national life," and the influence of this, particularly in England and 
America, in fixing classical training as the approved type of secondary 
education. 

19. Explain how the written theme of to-day is the successor of the mediaeval 
disputation. 

20. Show how the methods of instruction employed in the new Latin gram- 
mar schools have been passed over to the native-language schools. 

21. From the paragraph quoted from Leach (p. 282), explain why a knowl- 
edge of Latin was for so long regarded as synonymous with being 
educated. 

22. Show how instruction in Latin, by being changed from cultural to disci- 
plinary ends, made French the language of diplomacy and society, 
tended to elevate all the vernacular tongues, and marked the beginnings 
of the end of the importance of Latin as a school study except for the 
purposes of the Roman CathoHc Church. 

27,. What was the purpose of the Latin instruction, as you received it? 
24. Does it require a higher quality of teaching to impart the cultural aspect 
of a study than is required for the disciplinary? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced : 

135. Guarino: On Teaching the Classical Authors. 

136. Vinet: The College de Guyenne at Bordeaux. 

137. Sturm: Course of Study at Strassburg. 

138. Colet: Statutes for St. Paul's School, London. 

(o) ReHgious Observances. 
{b) Admission of Children. 
(c) The Course of Study. 

139. Ascham: On Queen Elizabeth's Learning. 

" 140. Colet: Introduction to Lily's Latin Grammar. 

141. William Sevenoaks: Foundation Bequest for Sevenoaks Grammar 

School. 

142. John Percy vail: Foundation Bequest for a Chantry Grammar School. 



286 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

143. Sandwich: A City Grammar School Foundation. 

144. Eton: Course of Study in 1560. 

145. Martindalc : Course of Study in an EngHsh Country Grammar School. 

146. Simpson: Degeneracy of Classical Instruction. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Show the large scope of Grammar, as outlined by Guarino (135). 

2. How generally was his dictum that a knowledge of Latin and Greek were 
essential for a well-educated gentleman (135) accepted? 

3. Compare the course of study .in Sturm's school (137) with that at Bor- 
deaux (136), and 'with that at Eton (144) a little later. 

4. From Ascham's statements (139), what do you infer as to the reception 
of the new learning at the English court? 

5. Show how Colet (138 a) and William Sevenoaks (141) both aimed to 
provide for real teachers, specialized for the service, and not for teaching 
as an adjunct to priestly duties. What was the significance of these 
provisions? 

6. Show that Colet (138 b) desired to train leaders, rather than followers. 

7. Show that he clearly provided (138 c) for a humanistic school of the 
reformed type. 

8. Characterize Colet's Introduction to Lily's Grammar (140). 

9. What was the educational significance of such a bequest as that of 
William Sevenoaks (141)? 

10. What did the founding of a chantry grammar school (142), instead of a 
song school, indicate as to the progress of education? 

11. Would the action taken by the authorities of the City of Sandwich (143) 
indicate that the humanistic grammar school had taken a deep holC 
on English thought, or not? The same with reference to the course given 
in a small English country grammar school, as described by Martindalc 

(145)? 

12. Just what does the instruction described as given by Campion (146) 

indicate? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. 
Jebb, R. C. Humanism in Education. 

Laurie, S. S. Development of Educational Opinion since the Renaissance. 
Laurie, S. S. "The Renaissance and the School, 1440-1580"; in School 
Review, vol. 4, pp. 140-48, 202-14. 
*Lupton, J. H. A Life of John Colet. 
Palgrave, F. T. "The Oxford Movement in the Fifteenth Century"; 

in Nineteenth Century, vol. 28, pp. 812-30. (Nov. 1890.) 
Seebohm, F. The Oxford Reformers of I4g8; Colet, Erasmus, More. 
*Stowe, A. M. English Grammar Schools in the Reign of Queen Elirabeth. 
*Thurber, C. H. " Vittorino da Feltre"; in School Review, vol. 7, pp. 295- 
300. 
Watson, Foster. English Grammar Schools to 1660. 
*Woodward, W. H. Vittorino da Feltre, and other Humanistic Educators. 
*Woodward, W. H. Education during the Renaissance. 
Woodward, W. H. Desiderius Erasmus, Concerning i^e Method and Aim 
of Education. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 

The new questioning attitude. The student can hardly have 
followed the history of educational development thus far without 
realizing that a serious questioning of the practices and of the 
dogmatic and repressive attitude of the omnipresent mediaeval 
Church was certain to come, sooner or later, unless the Church 
itself realized that the mediaeval conditions which once demanded 
such an attitude were rapidly passing away, and that the new life 
in Christendom now called for a progressive stand in religious 
matters as in other affairs. The new life resulting from the Cru- 
sades, the rise of commerce and industry, the organization of city 
governments, the rise of lawyer and merchant classes, the forma- 
tion of new national States, the rise of a new "Estate" of trades- 
men and workers, the new knowledge, the evolution of the uni- 
versity organizations, and the discovery of the art of printing — 
all these forces had united to develop a new attitude toward the 
old problems and to prepare western Europe for a rapid evolution 
out of the mediaeval conditions which had for so long dominated 
all action and thinking. This the Church should have realized, 
and it should have assumed toward the progressive tendencies of 
the time the same intelligent attitude assumed earlier toward the 
rise of scholastic inquiry. But it did not, and by the fifteenth 
century the situation had been further aggravated by a marked 
decline in morality on the part of both monks and clergy, which 
awakened deep and general criticism in all lands, but particularly 
among the northern peoples. 

~^he Revival of Learning was the first clear break with medias- 
valism. In the critical and constructive attitude developed by 
the scholars of the movement, their renunciation of the old forms 
of thinking, the new craving for truth for its own sake which they 
everywhere awakened, and their continual appeal to the original 
sources of knowledge for guidance, we have the definite begin- 
nings of a modern scientific spirit which was destined ultimately 
to question all things, and in time to usher in modern conceptions 
and modern ways of thinking. \ The authority of the mediaeval 
Church would be questioned, and out of this questioning would 



288 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

come in time a religious freedom and a religious tolerance un- 
known in the mediasval world. The great world of scientific 
truth would be inquired into and the facts of modern science es- 
tablished, regardless of what preconceived ideas, popular or re- 
ligious, might be upset thereby. The divine right of kings to rule, 
and to dispose of the fortunes and happiness of their peoples as 
they saw fit, was also destined to be questioned, and another new 
"Estate" would in time arise and substitute, instead, in all pro- 
gressive lands, the divine right of the common people. Religious 
freedom and toleration, scientiiic inquiry and scholarship, and 
the ultimate rise of democracy were all involved in the critical, 
questioning, and constructive attitude of the humanistic scholars 
of the Renaissance. These came historically in the order just 
stated, and in this order we shall consider them. 

Humanism became a religious reform movement in the North. 
In Italy the Revival of Learning was classical and scientiiic in its 
methods and results, and awakened little or no tendency toward 
religious and moral reform. Instead it resulted in something of a 
paganization of religion, with the result that the Papacy and the 
ItaHan Church probably reached their lowest religious levels at 
about the time the great religious agitation took place in northern 
lands. In the latter, on the contrary, the introduction of human- 
ism awakened a new religious zeal, and religious reform and classi- 
cal learning there came to be associated almost as one movement. 
In England, Germany, the Low Countries, and in large parts of 
northern France, the new learning was at once directed to rehg- 
ious and moral ends. The patriotic emotions roused in the Ital- 
ians by the humanistic movement were in the northern countries 
superseded by religious and moral emotions, and the constant ap- 
peal to sources turned the northern leaders almost at once back to 
the Church Fathers and the original Greek and Hebrew Testa- 
ments for authority in religious matters. 

Colet, from England, who had spent the years 1493-96 in 
Florence (p. 254), during the period when Savonarola (1452-98) 
was preaching moral reform there, returned home, not only a 
humanist, but a religious reformer as well, and began to lecture at 
Oxford on the Epistles of Saint Paul in the Greek. Linacre, Gro- 
cyn, Colet, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (author of Utopia), 
among others, formed a little group of humanists all of whom 
were also deeply interested in a reform of the practices of the 
Church. Erasmus, in particular, labored hard by his writings to 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 289 

remove religious abuses. His Colloquies (15 19), a widely used 
Latin reading book, was banned from the classrooms of the Uni- 
versity of Paris (1528), and forbidden to be used in Catholic lands 
by the Church Council of Trent (1564), because of the way in 
which it held up to ridicule the abuses in the Church, the super- 
stitions of the age, and the immoralities in the lives of the monks 
and clergy. His work as Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, his 
numerous editions of the writings of the Church Fathers, and his 
Latin-Greek edition (15 16), of the New Testament ^ all alike 
tended to turn theological scholars back to the original sources 
instead of to the scholastics for the foundations of their religious 
faith. In Germany such men as Hegius (p» 271), Reuchlin (p. 
254), and Melanchthon (p. 270) began, by similar methods, to go 
back to Greek and Hebrew sources and to the Church Fathers for 
new interpretations as to religious doctrines. In so doing they 
discovered that many practices and demands of the Church, all of 
which had grown up during the long mediaeval period, were not in 
harmony with the earlier teachings of Christ, the Apostles, or the 
early Fathers. In France, Jacques Lefevre (c. 1455-1536), a hu- 
manist and a pioneer Protestant, contended for the rule of the 
Scriptures and for justification by faith, and translated the Bible 
into the French (New Testament, 1523; complete, 1530) that the 
people might read it. 

Evolution or revolution. The reaction against the mediaeval 
dogmas of the Church and the demand by the humanists of the 
North for a return to the simpler religion of Christ gradually 
grew, and in time became more and more insistent. This demand 
was not something which broke out all at once and with Luther, 
as many seem to think. Had this been so he would soon have 
been suppressed, and little more would have been heard of him. 
Instead, the Hterature of the time clearly reveals that there had 
been, for two centuries,"an increasing criticism of the Church, and 

1 Up to this time the only Latin Bible had been the Vulgate (p. 131), translated 
by Jerome in the fourth century. Erasmus went back to and edited the original 
Greek manuscripts, and then prepared a new parallel Latin translation, the two 
being printed side by side. He also added many explanations of his own which 
mercilessly exposed the mistakes of the theologians and the Church, and pointed 
out the errors in translation which were embodied in the Vulgate. This work passed 
through numerous editions and sold in thousands of copies all over Europe. 

So dangerous was this comparative method that "Greek was judged a heretical 
tongue. No one should lecture on the Nev/ Testament, it was declared, without a 
previous theological examination. It was held to be heresy to say that the Greek 
or Hebrew text read thus, or that a knowledge of the original language is necessary 
to interpret the Scriptures correctlv." 



290 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



a number of local and unsuccessful efiforts at reform had been at- 
tempted. The demand for reform was general, and of long stand- 
ing, outside of Italy and southern France. Had it been heeded 
probably much subsequent history might have been different. A 
few of the more important attempts at reform may be mentioned 
here, as a background for our study. 

The first organized revolt against the Church occurred in south- 
ern France, in the early thirteenth century, and the revolters (Al-- 
higenses) were so fearfully pufiished by fire and sword that it was 
not attempted there again. 

In 1378 there was a disputed papal election, and for nearly 
forty years there were two Popes, one at Rome, and one at Avig- 
non in southern France, each 
attempting to control the 
Church and each denouncing 
the other as Antichrist. The 
discussions which accompanied 
this " Great Schism " did much 
to weaken the authority of the 
Church in all Christian lands. 
In England a popular preach- 
er and Oxford divinity gradu- 
ate by the name of John 
Wy cliff e was led, by the sad 
condition of the Church there, 
to a careful study of the Bible. 
He came to the conclusion 
that many of the claims of the 
Popes and many practices 
of the Church were wrong 
(R. 147), and he refused to 
accept teachings of the Church 
for which he could not find 
sanction in the Bible. His revolt was as direct and vigorous as 
that of Luther, in German lands, a century and a half later 
(R. 148) . So great was his zeal for reform that he and his scholars 
attempted a translation of the Bible ^ into English (see Figure 93), 

1 This was accomplished between 1382 and 1384. WycHffe translated only a 
part of the Old Testament, and the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Mark of 
the New. The remainder was done under his direction by others. The translation 
was from the Latin Vulgate, and was crude and imperfect. The large number of 
copies of parts of this translation which have survived, in manuscript form, to the 




Fig. 86. John Wycliffe (i32o?-84) 
A popular English preacher 
(Drawn from an old print) 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 291 



that the people might read it, and he and his followers (called 
Lollards) went about the country teaching what they believed 
to be the true Christianity. What had before in England been 
a widespread but undefined feehng of disaffection for the rich 
and careless clergy and monks, the work of Wy cliff e organized 
into a political and social force. 

Due to the then close connection of the English and Bohemian 
courts, through royal marriages, WycHffe's teachings were carried 
to Bohemia, where a popular 
preacher and university the- 
ologian by the name of John 
Huss (13 73-141 5) expounded 
them. He denounced the evil 
conduct of the clergy, and he 
and his followers tried to in- 
troduce several new customs 
into the Church. For this 
Huss was first excommuni- 
cated, and then burned at 
the stake as a dangerous 
heretic.^ After a series of 
terrible massacres his follow- 
ers were forced, in large part, 
to accept once more the old 
system. 

In 1414 a Council_of_the 
Church was calledTat Con- 
stance, in Switzerland, to 
heal the papal schism, and 
this Council made a serious attempt at church reform. After 
reuniting the Church under one Pope, if^rew up a hst of abuses 
which it ordered remedied (R. 149). It also attempted to estab- 
hsh a democratic form of organization for the government of the 
Church, with Church Councils meeting from time to time to 

present time show that it must have awakened much interest, and been widely 
copied and recopied during the century before the invention of printing. 

1 The heretic, it should be remembered, was the anarchist of the Middle Ages. 
The Church regarded heresy as a crime, worthy of the most severe punishments. 
The Church and the civil governments proceeded against the heretic as against an 
enemy of society and order. Heretics could not give exadence in a civil court, were 
prohibited from marrying or from giving a son or daughter in marriage, and even 
to speak with a heretic was an ofiense. Ev3n torture and death were regarded as 
justified to stamp out heresy. 




Fig. 87. Religious Warfare in 

Bohemia 

Sacking a village 

(From a picture in the Germanic Museum 

at Nuremberg) 



292 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

advise with the Pope and formulate church poHcy, much Hke the 
government of a modern parHament and king. Had this suc- 
ceeded, much future history might have been different ^ and the 
civiHzation of the world to-day much advanced. But the attempt 
failed, and the absolutism of the reunited Papacy became stronger 
than ever before. Protests of princes, actions of legislative as- 
semblies,^ protests sometimes of bishops,^ the failing allegiance of 
men of affairs, the increasing condemnation and ridicule from 
laymen and scholars — all signs of a strong undercurrent of 
public opinion — • seemed to have no effect on those responsible 
for the policy of the Church. 

That the different rebellions and refusals of reform helped di- 
rectly to the ultimate break of Luther is not probable, as Luther 
seems to have worked out his position by himself. Each of these 
earher defiances of authority and the later defiance of Luther 
were alike, though, in two respects. Each demanded a return 
to the usages and beliefs and practices of the earlier Christian 
Church, as derived from a study of the Bible and of the writings 
of the early Christian Fathers; and each insisted that Christians 
should be permitted to study the Bible for themselves, and reach 
their own conclusions as to Christian duty. In this demand to 
be allowed to go back to the original sources for authority, and 
the assertion of the right to personal investigation and conclu- 
sions, we see the new intellectual standards established by the 
Revival of Learning in full force. After 1 500 the rising demands 
for moral reform and the recognition of individual judgment 
could not be put aside much longer. Unless there could be evolu' 

^ "What would have been the result had the Council of Constance succeeded 
where it failed? It seems certain that one result would have been the formation 
of a government for the Church like that which was taking shape at the same time 
in England — a limited monarchy with a legislature gradually gaining more and 
more the real control of affairs. It seems almost equally certain that with this the 
churches of each nationality would have gained a large degree of local independence, 
and the general government of the Church have assumed by degrees the character 
of a great federal and constitutional State. If this had been the case, it is hard to 
see why all the results which were accomplished by the reformation of Luther might 
not have been attained as completely without the violent disruption of the Church." 
(Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, p. 403.) 

2 In 1302 the first "Estates-General" of France supported the King, and denied 
the right of the Pope to any supremacy over the State in France. In England, 
about the same time, the right of the Pope to levy taxation on the EngUsh was dis- 
puted by King and ParHament. In 1446 WiUiam III of Saxony limited the powers 
of ecclesiastical courts, and forbade appeals from Saxon decisions to any foreign 
court. 

^ The London Academy, 1893, p. 197, published evidence to show that there was 
a widespread demand among the bishops of Spain for church reformation, during 
the fifteenth century, and along the same lines that Luther advocated later. 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 293 

tion there would be revolution. Evolution was refused,^ and 
revolution was the result. _ 

Discontent in German lands. It happened that the first revolt 
to be successful in a large way broke out in Germany, and about 
the person of an Augustinian monk and Professor of Theology in 
the University of Wittenberg by the name of Martin Luther 
(1483-1546). Had it not centered about Luther the revolt would 
have come about some one else; had it not come in Germany it 
would have come in some other land: It was the modern scien- 
tific spirit of inquiry and reason in conflict with the mediaeval 
spirit of dogmatic authority, and two such forces are sooner or 
later destined to clash. Whether we be Catholic or Protestant, 
and whether we approve or disapprove of what Luther did or of 
his methods, makes httle difference in this study. Over a ques- 
tion involving so much religious partisanship we do not need to 
take sides. All that we need concern ourselves with is that a cer- 
tain Martin Luther lived, did certain things, made certain stands 
for what he believed to be right, and what he did, whether right 
or wrong, whether beneficial to progress and civilization or not, 
stands as a great historical fact with which the student of the his- 
tory of education must take account. That the same or even bet- 
ter results might have been arrived at in time by other methods 
may be true, but what we are concerned with is the course which 
history actually took.^ 

^ "But all these attempts at reformation in the Church, large and small, had 
failed, as had those of the early fifteenth century to reform its government, leaving 
the Church as thoroughly mediaeval in doctrine and in practical religion as it was in 
poUty. It was the one power, therefore, belonging to the Middle Ages which still 
stood unaffected by the new forces and opposed to them. In other directions the 
changes had been many; here nothing had been changed. And its resisting power 
was very great. Endowed with large wealth, strong in numbers in every State, 
with no lack of able and thoroughly trained minds, its interests, as it regarded them, 
in maintaining the old were enormous, and its power of defending itself seemed 
scarcely to be broken. . . . 

"The Church had remained unaffected by the new forces which had transformed 
everything else. It was still thoroughly medisev^al. In government, in doctrine, 
and in Hfe it still placed the greatest emphasis upon those additions which the pecu- 
liar conditions of the Middle Ages had built upon the foundations of the primitive 
Christianity, and it was determined to remain unchanged." (Adams, G. B., Civili- 
zation during the Middle Ages, pp. 406, 412.) 

^ Every reform movement produces two kinds of reformers, each seeking the 
same ultimate goal, but differing materially as to methods of work. In the religious 
conflict these two types are well represented by Erasmus and Luther. Erasmus was 
as deeply interested in religious reform as Luther and devoted the energies of a life- 
time to trying to secure reform, but he believed that reformation should come from 
within, and that the way to obtain it was to remain within the old organization and 
work to reform it. Luther represented the other type, the type which feels that 
things are too bad for mere reform to be effective, and that what is wanted is rebel- 
lion against the old. The two tVpes seldom agree as to means, and usually part 



294 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

There were special reasons why the trouble, when once it broke, 
made such rapid headway in German lands. The Germans had a 
long-standing grudge against the Italian papal court, chiefly be- 
cause it had for long been draining Germany of money to support 
the Italian Church. Germany's greatest minnesinger, Walther 
von der. Vogelweide (1170-1228), three centuries before Luther 
had sung to the German people how the Pope made merry over 
the stupid Germans. 

"All their goods will be mine, 

Their silver is flowing into my far-away chest; 
Their priests are living on poultry and wine, 
And leaving the silly layman to fast." 

Many positions in the German Church had been filled by the 
Pope with Italians, who not infrequently drew the perquisites, 
but did not reside in Germany. The princely and feudal Arch- 
bishops of Mayence, Treves, Cologne, and Salzburg, with their 
fortified castles and lands and troops and large governmental 
powers, frequently proved to be serious sources of irritation. The 
most widespread discontent, though, arose over the heavy church 
taxation, which drained the money of the people to Italy. The 
whole German people, from the princes down to the peasants, 
felt themselves unjustly treated, that the German money which 
flowed to Rome should be kept at home, and that the immoral 
and ineflicient clergy should be replaced by upright, earnest men 
who would attend better to their religious duties (R. 150). It 
was these conditions which prepared the Germans for revolt, and 
enabled Luther to rally so many of the princes and people to his 
side when once he had defied authority. 

The German revolt. The crisis came over the sale of indul- 
gences for sins by the papal agent, Tetzel, who began the practice 
in the neighborhood of Wittenberg, where Luther was a Professor 
of Theology, in 15 16. There is little doubt but that Tetzel, in 
his zeal to raise money for the rebuilding of the church of Saint 
Peter's at Rome, a great undertaking then under way, exceeded 
his instructions and made claims as to the nature and efficacy of 
indulgences which were not warranted by church doctrines. 
Such would be only human. The sale, however, irritated Luther, 
and he appealed to the Archbishop of Magdeburg to prohibit it. 
Faihng to obtain any satisfaction, he followed the old university 

company. One is content to be known as a conservative or a conformer; the other 
delights in being classed as a progressive or even as a radical. 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 295 

custom, made out ninety-five theses, or reasons, why he did not 
believe the practice justifiable, detailed the abuses, set forth what 
he conceived to be the true Christian doctrine in the matter, and 
challenged all comers to a debate on the theses (R. 151). Fol- 
lowing true university custom, also, these theses were made out in 
Latin, and in October, 1517, Luther followed still another univer- 
sity custom and nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg. 
Luther was probably as much surprised as any one to find that 
these were at once translated into German, printed, and in two 
weeks had been scattered all over Germany. Within a month 
they were known in all the important centers of the Western 
Christian world. They had been carried everywhere on the cur- 
rents of discontent. ' Luther at first intended no revolt from the 
Church, but only a protest against its practices. From one step 
to another, though, he was gradually led into open rebellion, and 
finally, in 1520, was excommunicated from the Church. He then 
expressed his defiance by publicly burning the bull of excommuni- 
cation, together with a volume of the canon law. This was open 
rebellion, and such heresy (R. 152) must needs be stamped out. 
Luther took his stand on the authority of the Scriptures, and the 
battle was now joined between the forces representing the author- 
ity of the Church versus the authority of the Bible, and salvation 
through the Church versus salvation through personal faith and 
works. ^ Luther also forced the issue for freedom of thought in 
religious matters. It was, to be sure, some three centuries before 
freedom in religious thinking and worship became clearly recog- 
nized, but what the early university masters and scholars had 
stood for in intellectual matters, Luther now asserted in religious 
affairs as well. 

We do not need to follow the details of the conflict. Suffice it 
to know that great portions of northern and western Germany 
followed Luther, as is shown in Figure 88, and that the Western 
Church, which had remained one for so many centuries and been 

1 "The early Protestant theory was that an individual's Christian religious life, 
convictions, and salvation were to be worked out through a direct study of the 
Scriptures, acceptance of the obvious teachings of Christ as there presented, and 
direct appeal to God through prayer for help in leading a Christian life. The Catho- 
lic position, on the other hand, came to be that the individual's religious Hfe was to 
be achieved through the intervention of the Church, which claimed on historical 
grounds to have been founded by Christ, and to be his official representative and 
mediator in the world. It was through the teachings of this Church that the indi- 
vidual was to receive his ideas of the Christian religion, to be stimulated to believe 
these, to be kept in the path of righteousness, and to obtain salvation." (Parker, 
S. C, History oj Modern Elementary Education, p. 35.) 



296 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



the one great unifying force in western Europe, was permanently 
split by the Protestant Revolt. The large success of Luther is 
easily explained by the new life which now permeated western 
Europe. The world was rapidly becoming modern, while the 





oa ^ip^^ 



O R T H ^J 1r hi}, 

SEA [di.nm-aOUv /"^""^ -^ 








V a^\ \ yii. 



in N(. \ l!\ 






•■^^ 




Lutheran. 
Calvinist. 
Anglican. 
Koman Catholic . 



Fig. 88. Showing the Results of the Protestant Revolts 



Church, with a perversity almost unexplainable, insisted upon re 
maining mediaeval and tried to force others to remain mediaeval 
with it. Adams expresses the situation well when he says: ^ 

A revolution had been wrought in the intellectual world in the cen- 
tury between Huss and Luther. At the death of Huss the world had 
only just begun the study of Greek. Since that date, the great body of 
classical literature had been recovered, and the sciences of philology 
and historical criticism thoroughly established. As a result Luther 
had at his command a well-developed method . . . impossible to any 
earlier reformer. . . . The world also had become familiar with inde- 
pendent investigation, and with the proclamation of new views and the 
upsetting of old ones. By no means the least of the great services of 
Erasmus to civilization had been to hold up before all the world so 
conspicuous an example of the scholar following, as his inalienable 
^ Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, p. 41.^. 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 297 



right, the truth as he found it and wherever it appeared to lead him, 
and honest in his pubhc utterances as to the results of his studies. . . . 
His was the crowning work of a century which had produced in the 
general public a greatly changed attitude of mind toward intellectual 
independence since the days of Huss. The printing press was of itself 
almost enough to account for Luther's success as compared with his 
predecessors. Wyclifife made almost as direct and vigorous an appeal 
to the public at large, and with "an amazing industry he issued tract 
after tract in the tongue of the people," but Luther had the advantage 
in the rapid multiplication of copies and in their cheapness, and he 
covered Europe with the issues of his press. . . . Luther spoke to a 
very different pubhc from that which Wycliffe or Huss had addressed, 
— a public European in extent, and one not merely familiar with the 
assertion of new ideas, but tolerant, in a certain way, of the innovator, 
and expectant of great things in the future. 

A revolution it undoubtedly was, but a revolution in thinking 
much more than a political revolution. It was but a further man- 
ifestation of the inquiring and questioning tendency awakened 
by the Revival of Learning. It might in a sense be dated from 
WycHffe and Huss, as well as from Erasmus and Luther. Luther 
did not create the Reformation. He rather popularized the work 
of preceding protesters, giving the impress of his powerful person- 
ality to the movement, and directing and moulding its form. 

Revolts in other lands. The outbreak in Germany soon spread 
to other lands. Lutheranism made rapid headway in Denmark, 
where the German grievances against Ital- 
ian rule were equally familiar, and in 1537 
the Danish Diet severed all connection with 
Rome and established Lutheranism as the 
religion of the country. Norway, being then 
a part of Denmark, was carried for Luther- 
anism also. In Sweden the Church was 
shorn of some of its powers and property in 
1527, and in 1592 Lutheranism was defi- 
nitely adopted as the rehgion for the na- 
tion. This included Finland, then a part 
of Sweden. An independent reform move- 
ment, closely akin to Lutheranism in its 
aims, made considerable headway in Ger- 
man Switzerland contemporaneously with 
the reform work of Luther in Germany, 
leadership of a popular humanist preacher in Zurich by the name 
'jf Huldreich Zwingli. In 15 19 he began a series of sermons on 




Fig. 89. Huldreich 
Zwingli (1487-1531) 

This was under the 



298 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

real religion, as he had learned it from a study of the New 
Testament writings. Zwingli, being supported by the people, 
made many changes in church practices and worship, eventually 
even abolishing the mass. Many other towns took up this re- 
form movement, and civil war was the result. Zwingli was 
killed in battle between Swiss partisans of the old regime and 
reformers, in 1531, but his work though checked persisted, and 
German Switzerland became mixed Catholic and Protestant.^ 

In England the struggle came nominally over the divorce (1533) 
of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, though the independ- 
ence of the English Church had been asserted from time to time 
for two centuries, and a free National Church had for long been a 
growing ideal with English statesmen. In 1534 Parliament 
passed the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) which severed England 
from Rome. By it the King was made head of the English Na- 
tional Church. The change was in no sense a profound one, such 
as had taken place in Lutheran Germany. The priests who took 
the new oath of allegiance to the King instead of the Pope as the 
head of the Church, as most of them did, continued in the 
churches, the service was changed to English, some reforms were 
instituted, but the people did not experience any great change in 
religious feeling or ideas. This new National Church became 
known as the EngHsh or Anglican Church. 

So far as the early history of America is concerned, the most 
important reform movement was neither Lutheranism nor Angli- 
canism, but Calvinism. In 1537 John Calvin, a French Protes- 
tant who had fled to Switzerland,^ was invited to submit a plan 
for the educational and religious reorganization of the city of 
Geneva, and in 1541 he was entrusted with the task of organizing 
there a little religious City-RepubHc. For this he established a 
combined church and city government, in which religious affairs 
and the civil government were as closely connected as they had 

1 A good illustration of the way parts of Germany and German Switzerland were 
divided by religious differences is to be found in the Canton of Appenzell, in north- 
eastern Switzerland. As each small governmental division had to follow the reli- 
gion of the ruling prince in Germany, so in Switzerland the cantons divided on reli- 
gious lines. To compromise matters in Appenzell the canton was divided into two 
half cantons, following the religious wars of 1597 — Inner Rhoden, of sixty-three 
square miles, exclusively Roman Catholic, and Outer Rhoden, of ninety-six square, 
miles, entirely under the Swiss Reformed Church. 

2 Calvinism is also a product of the northern humanism, Calvin's difficulties with 
the Church arising out of his study of the Greek texts. Calvin had received an 
excellent theological and legal education, and used the knowledge and training 
derived from both to help him formulate a comprehensive system of belief. 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 299 




Fig. 90. John Calvin 
(i 509-1 564) 

(Drawn from a contemporary 
painting) 



ever been in any Catholic country. During the twenty-three 

years that Calvin dominated Gene\-a it became the Rome of 

Protestantism. Calvin's The Institutes of Christianity, published 

in Latin in 1536, and in French in 1541, 

was the first orderly presentation of 

the principles of Christian faith from 

the Protestant standpoint,^ while his 

French Catechism (1537) was extensively 

used ^ in Calvinistic lands as a basis 

for elementary religious instruction. 

From Geneva a reformed Calvinistic 
religion spread over northern France,^ 
where its followers became known as 
Huguenots; to Scotland (1560), where 
they were known as Scotch Presbyteri- 
ans; to the Netherlands (1572), where 
originated the Dutch Reformed Church; 
and to portions of central England, 
where those who embraced it becatne 
known as Puritans. Through the Puri- 
tans who settled New England, and 
later through the Huguenots in the Carolinas, the Scotch Presby- 
terians in the central colonies, and the Dutch in New York, 
Calvinism was carried to America, was for long the dominant 
religious belief, and profoundly colored all early American edu- 
cation. Lutheranism also came in through the Swedes along the 
Delaware and the Germans in Pennsylvania, while the Anghcan 
Church, known in America_as the Episcopalian, came in through 
the landed aristocracy in Virginia and the later settlers in New 
York. The early settlement of America was thus a Protestant 

1 Like the famous Sentences of Peter Lombard (p. 171), it formed a splendid text- 
book of the new faith. Calvin based his work on the infallibility of the Bible, as 
against that of the Church and Pope, and presented, in a remarkably clear and 
logical manner, the principles of Calvinistic doctrine. Before 1630, as many as 
seventy-four full editions and fourteen partial editions of the Institutes had been 
printed, and in nine different languages. 

^ This went through seventy-seven editions (fourteen in English) before 1630, and 
in nearly all the languages of Europe, and was one of four Catechisms, one of which 
was required of all Oxford undergraduates in 1578. It was adopted by the Scotch, 
Huguenot, French-Swiss, and Walloon (Dutch) churches, and was widely used in 
Holland, England, and America. (See " Calvin and Calvinism," in Monroe's Cyclo- 
pedia of Education, vol. i.) 

* By 1560 the Calvinists had two thousand houses for religious worship in France, 
and demanded reUgious freedom. In 1562 the persecutions began in earnest, and 
for the next thirty-six years religious warfare ruled in France. In 1598 the Edict 
cf Nantes established religious freedom, though this was revoked in 1685. 



300 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

settlement, while the migration to America of large numbers 
of peoples from CathoHc lands is a relatively recent move- 
ment. 

Religious freedom and religious warfare. Of course the revolt 
against the authority of the Church, once inaugurated, could not 
be stopped. The same right to freedom in religious belief which 
Luther claimed for himself and his followers had of course to be 
extended to others. \This the Protestants were not much more 
willing to grant than had been the Catholics before them. The 
world was not as yet ready for such rapid advances, and religious 
toleration,^ though established in principle by the revolt, was an 
idea to which the world has required a long time to become accus- 
tomed. It took two centuries of intermittent religious warfare, 
during whicn Catholic and Protestant waged war on one another, 
plundered and pillaged lands, and murdered one another for the 
salvation of their respective souls, before the people of western 
Europe were wilhng to stop fighting and begin to recognize for 
others that which they were fighting for for themselves. When 
religious tolerance finally became estabHshed by law, civilization 
had made a tremendous advance. 

The religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
were waged with greatest intensity in Spain, France, and the 
German States, though no land wholly escaped. The result of 
this religious strife was to check the progress of the higher civiliza- 
tion of the people for nearly three centuries, and to delay greatly 
the coming of the great blessing of freedom in matters of reli- 
gious belief, while the poverty and misery resulting from the devas- 
tation of these rehgious wars left neither the energy for nor the 
interest in educational or political progress. 

The struggle to suppress Lutheranism in Germany was post- 
poned for twenty-five years — • due to outside pressure, chiefly 
that of the Turks in southeastern Europe — from the time that 
the Diet of Worms decided against Luther (15 21). Finally, in 
1546, the German-Spanish Emperor Charles V felt at last free to 
proceed against the Lutheran heresy, and from the breaking-out 
in that year of the struggle between Charles and the German 

1 Even the celebrated Peace of Augsburg (1555) which left to each German prince 
and each town and knight the liberty to choose between the beliefs of the Roman 
Church and the Lutheran, provided only for religious freedom for the rulers, and 
only one alternative. Calvinists, for example, hated equally by Catholic and 
Lutheran, were not included. So deeply was the idea of Church and State as insep- 
arable embedded in the minds of men that no provision was made for the religious 
freedom of subjects. This was a much later evolution, coming first in America. 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 301 



princes who sided with Luther, to the Peace of Westphalia, in 
1648, represents a century of almost continual religious warfare in 
the German States. The worst of the period was the last thirty 
years, when rehgious ferocity and hatred reached its climax in the 
period known as the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). Though 
fought on German soil, France, Spain, and Sweden were deeply 
involved in the struggle. It left Germany a ruin. From the 
most prosperous State in Europe, in 1550, Germany was so re- 
duced that it was not until the second third of the nineteenth cen- 
tury that central and southern Germany had fully recovered. 
More than half the population and two thirds of the movable 
property were swept away. The people were so reduced by star- 
vation that cannibalism was openly practiced. But one tenth of 
the inhabitants of the Duchy of Wiirtemberg were left alive. 
Land tilled for centuries became a wilderness, thousands of towns 
were destroyed, whole trades were swept away, and the genera- 
tion which survived the war came to manhood without knowing 
education, religion, law and order, or organized industry. Not 
until the end of the eighteenth century was Germany again able 
to make any significant contribution to educa- 
tion or civiHzation, and not until the middle of 
the nineteenth century did parts of Germany 
come to have as many people or cattle as 
before this devastating religious war broke out. 
From 1560 to 1629 in France, also, a period 
of carnage and devastation prevailed, due 
to an attempt to exterminate the Calvinistic 
Huguenots. In the massacre of Saint Bar- 
tholomew's eve, in 1572, ten thousand Protes- 
tants are said to have perished in Paris alone, 
and forty-five thousand additional outside the 
city. Though the Edict of Nantes (1598) had 
granted rehgious toleration, this never was fully 
accomphshed, and in 1685 the Edict was re- 
voked. The Huguenots were now given fif- Fig. 91. A French 
teen days to become Cathohcs or leave France. Protestant (c. 1600) 
The demands were enforced with great se- d^\rtillerie Paris 
verity, and the sect, which embraced one 
tenth of the population of France, was stamped out and France 
became once more a Catholic country. In a short time four 
hundred thousand thrifty and highly intelhgent Huguenots had 




302 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

left France for other lands. In Southern German lands, Holland, 
England, and America many found a new home. 

Changed attitude toward the old problems. The Peace of 
Westphalia (1648), which ended the bloody Thirty Years' War, it- 
self the culmination of a century of bitter and vindictive religious 
strife, has often been regarded as both an end and a beginning. 
Though the persecution of minorities for a time continued, es- 
pecially in France, this treaty marked the end of the attempt 
of the Church and the Catholic States to stamp out Protestant- 
ism on the continent of Europe. The religious independence of 
the Protestant States was now acknowledged, and the begin- 
nings of religious freedom were established by treaty. This new 
freedom of conscience, once definitely begun for the ruHng princes, 
was certain in time to be extended further. Ultimately the day 
must come, though it might be centuries away, when individual 
as well as national freedom in rehgious matters must be granted 
as a right, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind finally be 
firmly established by law.^ 

The end of the period of bitter religious warfare, too, was fol- 
lowed by a reaction against religious intolerance which contained 
within itself the germs of much future liberty and human prog- 
ress. Paulsen has well expressed the change, in the following 
words: ^ 

The long and terrible wars to which the ecclesiastical schism had 
everywhere given rise — the wars of the Huguenots in France, the 
Thirty Years War, and the Civil War in England — ■ had, in the end, 
created a feeling of indifference toward religious and theological prob- 
lems. Did it really pay, people asked themselves, to kill each other 
and devastate each other's countries for the sake of such questions? 
Could these problems ever be decided at all? If not, was it not much 
more reasonable to let everyone believe what he could, and, instead of 
wasting breath and arguments, convincing to nobody, on transubstan- 
tiation, predestination, and real presence, to cultivate sciences which 
really placed lasting and verifiable truths within the reach of the 
understanding, such as mathematics and natural philosophy, geog- 
raphy and astronomy? Here were sciences which offered knowledge 
to the mind that could be turned to account in this earthly life, whereas 
those transcendental speculations were of no use at all. . . . Toward 
the end of the seventeenth century this spirit of indifference and scep- 
ticism toward theology, and sometimes even toward religion in general 

^ In the proposals for the League of Nations Covenant, made at the conclusion 
of the World War, in 19 19, religious freedom, for all persons in any State in the 
League was finally decided to be a necessary principle for any world league. 

2 Paulsen, Fr., German Education, Past and Present, pp. 96-97. 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 303 

and the future world, formed a most important factor in the changing 
intellectual attitude of the times. ^ 

Physically exhausted, and recognizing at last the futility of fire 
and sword as means for stamping out opposing rehgious convic- 
tions, but still thoroughly convinced as to the correctness of their 
respective points of view, both sides now settled down to another 
century and more of religious hatred, suspicion, and intolerance, 
and to a close supervision of both preaching and teaching as safe- 
guards to orthodoxy. During the century following the Peace of 
Westphalia greater reliance than ever before was placed on the 
school as a means for protecting the faith, and the pulpit and the 
school now took the place of the sword and the torch as convert- 
ing and holding agents. 

Religious reform. The effect of the Protestant Revolts on the 
Church was good. For the first time in history Catholic church- 
men learned that they could not rely on the general acceptance of 
any teachings they promulgated, or any practices they saw fit to 
approve. The spirit of inquiry which had been aroused by the 
methods of the humanists would in the future force them to ex- 
plain and to defend. If they were to make headway against this 
great rebellion they must reform abuses, purify church practices, 
and see that monks and clergy led upright Christian lives. Un- 
less the mass of the people could be made loyal to the Church by 
reverence for it, further revolts and the ultimate break-up of the 
institution were in prospect. " The Council of Trent (1545-63) at 
last undertook the reform which should have come at least a cen- 
tury before. Better men were selected for the church offices, and 
bishops and clergy were ordered to reside in their proper places 
and to preach regularly. New religious orders arose, whose pur- 
pose was to prepare priests better for the service of the Church 
and for ministry to the needs of the people. Irritating practices 
were abandoned. The laws and doctrines of the Church were re- 
stated, in new and better form. Moral reforms were instituted. 
In most particulars the reforms forced by the work of Luther were 
thorough and complete, and since the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury the Catholic Church, in morals and government, has been a 
reformed Church. Above all, attention was turned to education 
rather than force as a means of winning and holding territory. A 

1 The terms atheist and atheism now arose, as the modern substitutes foiTexcom- 
munication and imprisonment, and during the next two centuries these were applied, 
by the churchmen of the time, to almost every prominent philosopher and scientist 
and independent thinker. 



304 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

rigid quarantine was, however, established in Catholic lands 
against the further spread of heretical text books and literature. 
Especially was the reading of the Bible, which had been the cause 
of all the trouble, for a time rigidly prohibited.^ 

Such, in brief, are the historical facts connected with the various 
revolts against authority which spUt the Roman Catholic Church 
in the sbcteenth century. These have been stated, as briefly and 
as impartially as possible, because so much of future educational 
history arose out of the conditions resulting from these revolts. 
The early educational history of America is hardly understand- 
able without some knowledge of the religious forces awakened 
by the work of the Protestants. To the educational significance 
and consequences of these revolts we next turn. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. How do you explain the difference in the effect, on the scholars of the 
time, of the Revival of Learning in Italy and in northern lands? 

2. How do you explain the serious church opposition to the different at- 
tempts of northern scholars to try to turn the Church back to the simpler 
religious ideals and practices of early Christianity? 

3. Explain how opposition to the practices of the Church could be organ- 
ized into a pohtical force. 

4. Explain the analogy of a heretic in the fifteenth century and an anarchist 
of to-day. 

5. Assuming that the Church had encouraged progressive evolution as a 
policy, and thus warded off revolution and disruption, in what ways 
might history have been different? 

6. How can the bitter opposition to the reading and study of the Bible be 
explained? 

7. Show the analogy between the freedom of thinking demanded by Luther, 
and that obtained three centuries earlier by the scholars in the rising 
universities. Why were the universities not opposed? 

8. Enumerate the changes which had taken place in western Europe be- 
tween the days of Wycliffe and Huss and the time of Luther, which en- 
abled him to succeed where they had failed. 

9. Explain in what ways the Protestant Revolt was essentially a revolution 
in thinking, and that, once started, certain other consequences must 
inevitably follow in time. 

10. Was it perfectly natural that the reformers should refuse to their follow- 
ers the same right to revolt, and separate off into smaller and still differ- 
ent sects, which they had contended for for themselves? Why? 

1 Very severe measures were enacted to prevent the spread of the contagion of 
heresy. All Protestant literature was forbidden circulation in Catholic lands. The 
printing-press, as a disseminator of heresy, was placed under strict license. Certain 
books were ordered burned. Perhaps the most extreme and ruthless measure was 
the prohibition, under penalty of deathj of the reading of the Bible. That this harsh 
act was carried out the record of martyrs shows. As one example may be mentioned 
the sister of the Flemish artist Matsys and her husband, he being decapitated and 
she buried alive in the square fronting the cathedral at Lou vain, in 1543, for having 
been caught reading the sacred Book. 



THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY 305 

11. On what basis could Catholic and Protestant wage war on one another 
to try to enforce their own particular belief? 

12. Compare the individualism of the Greek Sophists with that of the 
Protestant reformers. Did Greece attempt to deal with them in the 
same way? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

147. WycHffe: On the Enemies of Christ. 

148. WycHffites: Attack the Pope and the Practice of Indulgences. 

149. Council of Constance: List of Church Abuses demanding Reform. 

150. Geiler: A German Priest's View as to Coming Reform. 

151. Luther: Illustrations from his Ninety-Five Theses. 

152. Saint Thomas Aquinas: On the Treatment of Heresy. 
, 153. Henry VIII: The EngUsh Act of Supremacy. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Was Wycliffe's attack (147) as direct and fierce as Luther's (151)? 

2. Explain the difference in the results attained by the two attacks? 

3. Was the challenge of Wycliffe's followers on indulgences (148) any less 
direct than that of Luther (151)? 

4. Does the list of items drawn up by the Church Council of Constance 
(149) indicate a general recognition of the need for extensive Church 
reform? 

5. Try to state the possible change in the progress of human history and 
civilization, had the demands of the Council of Constance (149) been 
carried out in good faith. 

6. Considering the nature of heresy at the time, does the extract from 
Thomas Aquinas (152) indicate a narrow or a Hberal attitude? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. 
Beard, Charles. Martin Luther and the Reformation. 
Beard, Charles. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in its Relation 

to Modern Thought attd Knowledge. (Hibbert Lectures, 1883.) 
Fisher, George P. History of the Reformation. 
Gasquet, F. A. Eve of the Reformation. 
Johnson, A. H. Europe in the Sixteenth Century. 
Perry, George G. History of the Reformation in England. 



CHAPTER XIII 

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT 
REVOLTS 

I. AMONG LUTHERANS AND ANGLICANS 

Ultimate consequences of the break with authority. That the 
Protestant Revolts in the different lands produced large immedi- 
ate and permanent changes in the character of the education pro- 
vided in the revolting States is no longer accepted as being the 
case. In every phase of educational histoty growth has pro- 
ceeded by evolution rather than by revolution, and this applies to 
the Protestant Revolts as well as to other revolutions. Many 
changes naturally resulted at once, some of which were good and 
some of which were not, while others which were enthusiastically 
attempted failed of results because they involved too great ad- 
vances for the time. Much, too, of the progress that was inaugu- 
rated was lost in the more than a century of rehgious strife which 
followed, and the additional century and more of suspicion, ha- 
tred, religious formalism, and strict religious conformity which 
followed the period of religious strife. The educational signifi- 
cance of the reformation movement, though, lies in the far-reach- 
ing nature of its larger results and ultimate consequences rather 
than in its immediate accomplishments, and because of this the 
importance of the immediate changes effected have been over- 
estimated by Protestants and underestimated by Catholics. 

The dominant idea underlying Luther's break with authority, 
and for that matter the revolts of Wychffe, Huss, Zwingh, and 
Calvin as well, was that of substituting the authority of the Bible 
in religious matters for the authority of the Church; of substitut- 
ing individual judgment in the interpretation of the Scriptures 
and in formulating decisions as to Christian duty for the collective 
judgment of the Church; and of substituting individual respon- 
sibihty for salvation, in Luther's conception of justification 
through personal faith and prayer, for the collective responsibility 
for salvation of the Church.^ Whether one believes that the 

1 Dr. Philip Sciiaff, the Church historian, says: " Schleiermacher reduced the whole 
difference between Romanism and Protestantism to the formula, ' Romanism makes 
the relation of the individual to Christ depend on his relation to the Church: 
Protestantism, vice versa, makes the relation of the individual to the Church depend 
on his relation to Christ.' " (Quoted by G. B. Adams, from a pamphlet, Luther 
Symposiac, Union Seminary, iS8,^.) 



RESULTS AMONG LUTHERANS 307 

Protestant position was sound or not depends almost entirely 
upon one's religious training and beliefs, and need not concern 
us here, as it makes no difference with the course of history. We 
can believe either way, and the course that history took remains 
the same. The educational consequences of the position taken 
by the Protestants, though, are important. 

Under the older theory of collective judgment and collective 
responsibiHty for salvation — that is, the judgment of the Church 
rather than that of individuals — it was not important that more 
than a few be educated. Under the new theory of individual 
judgment and individual responsibility promulgated by the Prot- 
estants it became very important, in theory at least, that every 
one should be able to read the word of God, participate intelli- 
gently in the church services, and shape his life as he understood 
was in accordance with the commandments of the Heavenly 
Father. This undoubtedly called for the education of all. Still 
more, from individual participation in the services of the Church, 
with freedom of judgment and personal responsibiHty in religious 
matters, to individual participation in and responsibility for the 
conduct of government was not a long step, and the rise of demo- 
cratic governments and the provision of universal education were 
the natural and ultimate corollaries, though not immediately 
attained, of the Protestant position regarding the interpretation 
of the Scriptures and the place and authority of the Church. This 
was soon seen and acted upon. The great struggle of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, in consequence, became one for reli- 
gious freedom and toleration ; the great struggle of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries has been for political freedom and poUt- 
ical rights ; to supply universal education has been left to the nine- 
teenth and the twentieth centuries. 

Schools and learning before the sixteenth century. After the 
rise of the universities, as we have seen, many Latin secondary 
schools were founded in western Europe, and a more extensive 
development of the cathedral and other larger church schools took 
place. Rashdall (R. 154) thinks that by 1400 the opportunity 
to attend a Latin grammar school was rather common, an opinion 
in which Leach and Nohle concur. After the humanistic learning 
had spread to northern lands these opportunities were increased 
and improved. In England, for example, some two hundred 
and fifty Latin grammar schools are known to have been in 
existence by 1500. In Germany, as we have seen (chapter xi)^ 



308 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

many such schools were founded before the time of Luther. 
These offered a form of advanced education, in the language of 
the educated classes of the time, for those intending to go to the 
universities to prepare for service in either Church or State, and 
for teaching. The Church had also for long maintained or exer- 
cised control over a number of types of more elementary schools 
— parish, song, chantry, hospital (chapter vii) — the chief pur- 
pose of which was to prepare for certain phases of the church serv- 
ice, or to enter the secondary schools. These schools, too, were 
taught partly or wholly in Latin. In consequence, while Latin 
schools came to be rather widely diffused, schools in the vernacu- 
lar hardly existed outside of a few of the larger commercial cities 
of the north. Even the burgh and guild schools (p. 205), estab- 
lished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were essentially 
Latin schools. 

In the commercial cities of the North, however, though often 
only after quite a struggle with the local church authorities, which 
throughout the Middle Ages had maintained a monopoly of all 
instruction as a protection to orthodoxy, different types of ele- 
mentary vernacular schools had been developed to meet local 
commercial needs^such as writing- schools to train writers,^ and 
reckoning-schools to train young men to handle accounts.^ Read- 
ing, manners, and religion were also taught in these schools. 
Other city schools, largely Latin in type, but containing some 
vernacular instruction to meet local business needs not met by 
i;he cathedral or parish schools of the city, were also developed. 
Up to the time of the Protestant Revolts, however, there was 
almost no instruction in the vernacular outside of the commercial 
cities, nor was there any particular demand for such instruction 

^ The importance of writing before the days of printing can readily be appreci- 
ated. Just as the monk was carefully trained to copy manuscript, so the clerk for a 
city or a business house needed to be carefully trained to read and write. Writing 
formed a distinct profession, there being the "city writer" (city clerk, we say), 
Latin and vernacular secretaries, traveling writers, writing teachers, etc. Writing 
masters sometimes taught reading also, but usually not. In some French cities 
the guild of writing masters was granted an official monopoly of the privilege of 
teaching writing in the city. 

''■ Reckoning schools were to meet direct commercial needs in the cities, and were 
seldom found outside of commercial towns. The arithmetic taught in the Latin 
schools as a part of the Seven Liberal Arts was largely theoretical; the arithmetic 
in the reckoning schools was practical. The work of the professional reckoner in 
time developed similarly to that of the professional writer, and often the two were 
combined in one person. When employed by a city he was known as the city clerk. 
In 1482 the first reckoning book to be pubhshed in Germany appeared, filled with 
merchant's rules and applied problems in denominate numbers and exchange. See 
an interesting monograph by Jackson, L. L., Sixteenth Century ArUhmetic (Trs. 
College Pubs., No. 8, 1906). 



RESULTS AMONG LUTHERANS 



309 



elsewhere. If one wished to be a scholar, a statesman, a diplo- 
mat, a teacher, a churchman, or to join a religious brotherhood, 
he needed to study the learned language of the time, — Latin. 





German French 

(From a woodcut, printed at (After a drawing by Soquand, 

Nuremberg, 1505) 1528) 

Fig. 92. Two Early Vernacular Schools 

With this he could be at home with people of his kind anywhere 
in western Europe. The vernacular he could leave to tradesmen, 
craftsmen, soldiers, laborers, and the servant classes. 

These people, on the other hand, had practically no need for a 
written language, aside from a very small amount for business 
needs. Even here the sign of the cross would do. There were 
but few books written in the vernacular tongues, and these had 
to be copied by hand and, in consequence, were scarce and expen- 
sive. There were no newspapers (first newspaper, Venice, 1563) 
or magazines. Spectacles for reading were not known until the 
end of the thirteenth century, and were not common for two cen- 
turies after that. There was httle knowledge that could not pass 
from mouth to mouth. Such little vernacular literature as did exist 
was transmitted orally, and no great issue which appealed to the 
imagination of the masses had as yet come to the front to create 
any strong desire for the ability to read. As a result, the educa- 
tion of the masses was in hand labor, the trades, and religion, and 
not in books, and the need for book education was scarcely felt. 



310 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

A new demand for vernacular schools. The invention of print- 
ing and the Protestant Revolts were in a sense two revolutionary 
forces, which in combination soon produced vast and far-reaching 
changes. The discovery of the process of making paper and the 
invention of the printing-press changed the whole situation as to 
books. These could now be reproduced rapidly and in large num- 
bers, and could be sold at but a small fraction of their former cost. 
The printing of the Bible in the common tongue did far more to 
stimulate a desire to be able to read than did the Revival of 
Learning (Rs. 155, 170). Then came the religious discussions of 
the Reformation period, which stirred intellectually the masses 
of the people in northern lands as nothing before in history had 
ever done. In an effort to reach the people the reformers dtigi- 
nated small and cheap pamphlets, written in the vernacular, and 
these, sold for a penny or two, were peddled in the market-places 
and from house to house. While there had been imperfect trans- 
lations of the Bible in German before Luther's, his translation 
(New Testament, 1522) was direct from the original Greek and so 
carefully done that it virtually fixed the character of the German 
language.^ Calvin's Institutes of Christianity (French edition, 
1 541) in a similar manner fixed the character of the French lan- 
guage,^ and Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (1526) 
was into such simple and homely language ^ that it fixed the char- 
acter of the English tongue, and was made the basis for the later 
Authorized translation. 

The leaders of the Protestant Revolts, too, in asserting that 
each person should be able to read and study the Scriptures as a 

1 Luther tried to make a translation so simple that even the unlearned might 
profit by listening to its reading. To insure that his translation should be in a lan- 
guage that would be perfectly clear and natural to the common people, he went 
about asking questions of laborers, children, and mothers to secure good colloquial 
expressions. ' It sometimes took him weeks to secure the right word, but so satis- 
factory was the result that it fixed the standard for modern German, and still stands 
as the most conspicuous landmark in the history of the German language. 

2 The French version of this great original work represents the first use of French 
as a language for an argumentative treatise, and, as Cahdn's work was more widely 
discussed than any other Protestant theological treatise, it did much to fix the char- 
acter of this national language. 

' "Tyndale's translation is not only the first which goes back to the original 
tongues, but it is so noble a translation in its mingled tenderness and majesty,_its 
Saxon simplicity, and its smooth, beautiful diction that it has been but little im- 
proved on since. Every succeeding version is little more than a revision of Tyn- 
dale's." (J. Paterson Smyth, Ho%v We Got Our Bible.) 

The following extract from Matthew is illustrative: "O oure father which art in 
heven, halewed be thy name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well 
in erth, as hit ys in heven. Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade. And forgeve vs 
cure treaspases, even as we forgeve them whych treaspas ys. Lede vs nott in to 
temptacion, but delyvre vs from yvell. Amen." 



RESULTS AMONG LUTHERANS 



311 



means to personal salvation, created an entirely new demand, in 
Protestant lands, for elementary schools in the vernacular. Here- 
tofore the demand had been for schools only for those who ex- 
pected to become scholars or leaders in Church or State, while 
the masses of the people had Httle or no interest in learning. Now 
a new class became desirous of learning to read, not Latin, but the 
language which they had already learned to speak. WyclifEe, 



\ 




\ 



'. yQ bigytmjmg-r^ot) made 06 tumitlimrae' 



^m 



<r\ 



'4lh 



l^ betuflfld/1 l^tifeafi'WflflD 1^0 Cc^ yc li;t pat 

];c eumtiO 1 ttumactU) i^oStnaaD :oDdi/aud pDij 
CeiD^^^c ^rtnamcttt b^ maflO tn pc tt^^^Dtd^of t^aiiS: 
Oqimt^ibamd fro t^atns/ono^d tnod^e ftr 

Fig. 93. The First Page of Wyclipfe's Bible 
Translated between 1382 and 1384. Facsimile of the first verses of Genesis 

Huss, ZwingU, Luther, Calvin, and Knox alike insisted on the 
importance of the study of the Bible as a primary necessity in the 
religious Ufe. In an effort to bring the Bible within reach of the 
people Wycliffe's followers had attempted the laborious and im- 
possible task of multiplying by hand (p. 290) copies of his transla- 
tion. Zwingli had written a pamphlet on The Manner of Instruc- 
tion and Bringing up Boys in a Christian Way (1524), in which he 
urged the importance of religious education. Luther, besides 
translating the Bible, had prepared two general Catechisms, one 



312 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

for adults and one for children, had written hymns, ^ and issued 
numerous letters and sermons in behalf of religious education. 
All these were printed in the vernacular and scattered broadcast. 
Luther thought that ''every human being, by the time he has 
reached his tenth year, should be familiar with the Holy Gospels, 
in which the very core and marrow of his life is bound." In his 
sermons and addresses he urged a study of the Bible and the duty 
of sending children to school. Calvin's Catechism similarly was 
extensively used in Protestant lands. 

I. Lutheran School Organization 

Educational ideas of Luther. Luther enunciated the most 
progressive ideas on education of all the German Protestant re- 
formers. In his Letter to the Mayors and Aldermen of all the Cities 
of Germany in behalf of Christian Schools (1524) (R. 156), and in 
his Sermon on the Duty of Sending Children to School (1530), we 
find these set forth. That his ideas could be but partially carried 
out is not surprising. There were but few among his followers 
who could understand such progressive proposals, they were 
entirely too advanced for the time, there was no body of vernacu- 
lar teachers ^ or means to prepare them, the importance of such 
training was not understood, and the religious wars which fol- 
lowed made such educational advantages impossible, for a long 
time to come. The sad condition of the schools, which he said 
were "deteriorating throughout Germany," awakened his deep 
regret, and he begged of those in authority "not to think of the 
subject Hghtly, for the instruction of youth is a matter in which 
Christ and all the world are concerned." All towns had to spend 
money for roads, defense, bridges, and the like, and why not some 
for schools? This they now could easily afford, "since Divine 
Grace has released them from the exaction and robbery of the 
Roman Church." Parents continually neglected their educational 
duty, yet there must be civil government. "Were there neither 
soul, heaven, nor hell," he declared, "it would still be necessary 
to have schools for the sake of affairs here below. . . . The world 

^ The most lamous of Luther's German hymns, and one expressive of the Protes- 
tant spirit, is the one beginning: 

"Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, "A mighty fortress is our God, 
Ein gute Wehr und Waffen." A bulwark never failing." 

This hymn has often been called "The Marseillaise of the Reformation." 
^ The evolution, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the German 
vernacular school-teacher out of the parish sexton is one of the interesting bits of 
our educational histcry. 



RESULTS AMONG LUTHERANS 



313 



has need of educated men and women to the end that men may 
govern the country properly and women may properly bring up 
their children, care for their domestics, and direct the affairs of 
their households." "The welfare of the State depends upon the 
intelligence and virtue of its citizens," he said, " and it is therefore 
the duty of mayors and aldermen in all cities to see that Christian 
schools are founded and maintained" (R. 156). 

The^parents of children he held responsible for their Christian 
and xivic education. This must be free, and equally open to all 




Fig. 94. Luther giving Instruction 
An ideaWrawing, though representative of early Protestant popular instruction 



boys and girls, high and low, rich and poor. It was the inher- 
ent right of each child to be educated, and the State must not only 
see that the means are provided, but also require attendance at 
the schools (R. 158). At the basis of all education lay Christian 
education. The importance of the services of the teacher was 
beyond ordinary comprehension (R. 157). Teachers should be 
trained for their work, and clergymen should have had experience 
as teachers. A school system for German people should be a 
state system, divided into: 

I. Vernacular Primary Schools. Schools for the common people, 

to be taught in the vernacular, to be open to both sexes, to include 

^reading, writing, physical training, singing, and religion, and to give 

practical instruction in a trade or in household duties. Upon this 



314 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



attendance should be compulsory. " It is my opinion," he said, "that 
we should send boys to school for one or two hours a day, and have 
them learn a trade at home the rest of the time. It is desirable that 
these two occupations march side by side." 

2. Latin Secondary Schools. Upon these he i)laced great emphasis 
(R. 156) as preparatory schools by means of which a learned clergy 
was to be perpetuated for the instruction of the people. In these he 
would teach Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, dialectic, history, science, 
mathematics, music, and gymnastics. 

3. The Universities. For training for the higher service in Church 
and State. 

The organizing work of Bugenhagen. Luther assist ed in re- 
organizing the churches at Wittenberg (1523), Leipzig_(i223), and 

Magdeburg (1524), in con- 
nection with all of which he 
provided for Lutheran- type 
schools.^ Luther, though, was 
not essentially an organizer. 
The organizing genius of the 
Reformation, in central and 
southern Germany, was Lu- 
ther's colleague, Philipp Me- 
lanchthon (1497-1560), Pro- 
fessor of Greek at the Uni- 
versity of Wittenberg. In 
northern Germany it was Jo- 
hannes Bugenhagen (1485- 
1558), another of Luther's col- 
leagues at Wittenberg. Mor*» 
than any other Germans these 
two directed the necessary re- 
organization of religion and 
education in those parts of Germany which changed from Roman 
Catholicism to German Lutheranism. The churches, of course, 
had to be reorganized as Lutheran churches, and the schools 
connected with them refounded as Lutheran schools. For the 
reorganization of each of these a more or less detailed Ordnnrg 
had to be written out (Rs. 159, 160). In this change cathedral 
and other large church schools became Latin secondary schools, 
while the song, chantry, and other types of parish elemen- 

1 Magdeburg is typical, where the Lutherans united all the parish schools under 
the supervision of one pastor. 




Fig. 95. Johannes Bugenhagen 

(1485-1558) 

Father of the Lutheran Volksschule in 

northern Germany 



RESULTS AMONG LUTHERANS 315 

tary schools were transformed into Lutheran vernacular parish 
schools. 

BugenhageiLwaa_seJit_ta_r_eorganize the churches of northern 
Germany. Being in close sympathy with Luther's ideas, he made 
good provision for Lutheran parish schools in connection with 
each of the churches he reorganized. At Brunswick (1528), Ham- 
burg (1529) (R. 159), Liibeck (1530), for his native State of 
Pomerania (1534), for Schleswig-Holstein (1537), and elsewhere 
in northern Germany, he drew up church and school plans 
(Kirchen und Schule-Ordnungen) which formed models (Rs. 159, 
160) for many northern German cities and towns. Besides pro- 
viding for a Latin school for the city, he organized elementary 
vernacular schools in each parish, for both boys and girls, in which 
instruction in reading, writing, and religion was to be given in the 
German tongue. He has been called the father of the German 
Volksschule, though probably much of what he did was merely 
the rq^direction of existing schools. In 1537 he was called to 
Denmark, by the Danish King, to reorganize the University of 
Copenhagen and the Danish Church and schools as Lutheran 
institutions. 

Efforts were also made to create Protestant schools in the 
Scandinavian countries. In Denmark writing-schools for both 
boys and girls were organized, and the sexton of each parish was 
ordered to gather the children together once a week for instruc- 
tion in the Catechism. In Sweden little was done before 1686, 
when Charles XI ordained that the sacristan of each parish should 
instruct the children in reading, while the religious instruction 
should be conducted by the clergy, and carried on by means of 
sermons, the Catechism, and a yearly public examination. The 
abihty to read and a knowledge of the Catechism was made nec- 
essary for communion. A Swedish law of this same time also 
ordered that, ''No one should enter the married state without 
knowing the lesser Catechism of Luther by heart and having re- 
ceived the sacrament." This latter regulation drove the peasants 
to request the erection of children's schools in the parishes, to be 
supported by the State, though it was not for more than a century 
that this was generally brought about. The general result of this 
legislation was that the Scandinavian countries, then including 
Finland, early became literate nations. 

The Reorganizing work of Melanchthon. Melanchthon, un- 
like Bugenhagen, was essentially a humanistic scholar, and his 



31 6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

interest lay chiefly in the Latin secondary schools. He prepared 
plans for schools in many cities and smaller States of central and 
southern Germany, among which were Luther's native town, 
Eisleben (1525), and for Nuremberg (1526; p. 271), Herzeberg 
(1538), Cologne (1543), and Wittenberg (1545) among cities; and 
Saxony (1528), Mecklenberg (1552), and the Palatinate (1556) 
among States. The schools he provided for Saxony may be 
described as typical of his work. 

In 1527 he was asked by the Elector of Saxony to head a com- 
mission of three to travel over the kingdom and report on its needs 
as to schools. In his Report, or Book of Visitation, which was 
probably the first school survey report in history, he outUned in 
detail plans for school organization for the State (R. 161), of which 
the following is an abstract: 

Each school was to consist of three classes. In the first class there 
was to be taught the beginnings of reading and writing, in both the 
vernacular and in I^atin, Latin grammar (Donatus), the Creed, the 
Lord's prayer, and the prayers and hymns of the church service. In 
the second class Latin became the language of instruction, and Latin 
grammar was thoroughly learned. Latin authors were read, and reli- 
gious instruction was continued. In the third class more advanced 
work in reading Latin (Livy, Sallust, Vergil, Horace, and Cicero) was 
given, and rhetoric and dialectic were studied. 

These were essentially humanistic schools with but a Httle prepar- 
atory work in the vernacular, and their purpose was to prepare 
those likely to become the future leaders of the State for entrance 
to the universities. How dififerent was Melanchthon's conception 
as to the needs for education from the conceptions of Luther and 
Bugenhagen may easily be seen. Yet, so great were his services 
in organizing and advising, and so well did such schools meet the 
g^eat demand of the time for educational leaders that he has, 
very properly, been called ''the Preceptor of Germany." His 
work was copied by other leaders, and the result was the organi- 
zation of a large number of humanistic gymnasia throughout 
northern Germany, in which the new learning and the Protestant 
faith were combined. Sturm's school at Strassburg (p. 272) was 
one of the more important and better organized of this type, many 
of which have had a continuous existence up to the present. By 
1540 the process was begun of endowing such schools from the 
proceeds of old monasteries, confiscated by the State, and many 
German gymnasia of to-day trace their origin back to some old 



RESULTS AMONG LUTHERANS 317 

monastic foundation, altered by state authority to meet modern 
needs and purposes. 

Early German state school systems. Melanchthon's Saxony 
plan was put into partial operation as a Lutheran Church school 
system, but the first German State to organize a complete system 
of schools was Wiirttemberg (R. 162), in southwestern Germany, 

>5^2^ This marks the real beginning of the German state 
school systems. Three classes of schools were provided for: 



^^sch'o 



^ ^.^.(T^Elementary schools, for both sexes, in which were to be taught 
''--fading, writmg, reckoning, singing, and religion, all in the vernacular.^ 
These were to be provided in every village in the Duchy. 

(2) Latin schools {Parlicularschulen) , with five or six classes, in which 
the ability to read, write, and speak Latin, together with the elements 
of mathematics and Greek in the last year, were to be taught. 

(3) The universities or colleges of the State, of which the University 
of Tubingen (f. 1476) and the higher school at Stuttgart were declared 
to be constituent parts. 

Acting through the church authorities, these schools were to be 
under the supervision of the State. 

The example of Wiirttemberg was followed by a number of the 
smaller German States. Ten years later Brunswick followed the 
same plan, and in 1580 Saxony revised its school organization 
after the state-system plan thus established. In 1619 the Duchy 
of Weimar added compulsory education in the vernacular for all 
children from six to twelve years of age. In 1642, the same date 
as the first Massachusetts school law (chapter xv), Duke Ernest 
the Pious of little Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg estabHshed the 
first school system of a modern type in German lands. An 
intelligent and ardent Protestant, he attempted to elevate his 
miserable peasants, after the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, 
by a wise economic administration and universal education. 
With the help of a disciple of the greatest educational thinker of 
the period, John Amos Comenius (chapter xvii), he worked out 
a School Code {Schuhnethode, 1642) which was the pedagogic 
masterpiece of the seventeenth century (R. 163). In it he pro- 
vided for compulsory school attendance, and regulated the details 
of method, grading, and courses of study. Teachers were paid sal- 
aries which for the time were large, pensions for their widows and 
children were provided, and textbooks were prepared and sup- 
plied free. So successful were his efforts that Gotha became one 
of the most prosperous little spots in Europe, and it was said 



3i8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

that "Duke Ernest's peasants were better educated than noble- 
men anywhere else." 

By the middle of the seventeenth century most of the German 
States had followed the Wurtemberg plan of organization. Even 
Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, which was a Catholic State, or- 
dered the establishment of "German schools" throughout his 
realm, with instruction in reading, writing, and the CathoHc 
creed, the schools to be responsible through the Church to the 
State. 

Protestant state school organization. We see here in German 
lands a new, and, for the future, a very important tendency. 
Throughout all the long Middle Ages the Church had absolutely 
controlled all education. From the suppression of the pagan 
schools, in 529 a.d., to the time of the Reformation there had been 
no one to dispute with the Church its complete monopoly of edu- 
cation. Even Charlemagne's attempt at the stimulation of edu- 
cational activity had been clearly within the lines of church con- 
trol. Until the beginnings of the modern States, following the 
Crusades, the Church had been the State as well, and for long 
humbled any ruler who dared dispute its power. In the later 
Middle Ages nobles and rising parliaments had at times sided with 
the king against the Church — warnings of a changing Europe 
that the Church should have heeded — but there had been no 
serious trouble with the rising nationalities before the sixteenth 
century. Now, in Protestant lands, all was changed. The 
authority of the Church was overthrown. By the Peace of Augs- 
burg (1555) each German prince and town and knight were to be 
permitted to make choice between the Catholic and Lutheran 
faith, and all subjects were to accept the faith of their ruler or 
emigrate. 

This established freedom of conscience for the rulers, but for 
no one else. It also gave them control of both religious and secu- 
lar affairs, thus uniting in the person of the ruler, large or small, 
control of both Church and State. This was as much progress 
toward religious freedom as the world was then ready for, as 
Church and State had been united for so many centuries that a 
complete separation of the two was almost inconceivable. It was 
left for the United States (1787) to completely divorce Church 
and State, and to reduce the churches to the control of purely 
spiritual affairs. 

The German rulers, however, were now free to develop schools 



RESULTS AMONG ANGLICANS 



319 



as they saw fit, and, through their headship of the Church in their 
principality or duchy or city, to control education therein. We 
have here the beginnings of the transfer of educational control 
from the Church to the State, 



Roman Catholic 

CHURCH 
State School 



The 
Middle 
Ages 



State _ Church - School 



Early 

Reformation 

Period. 

Bujrenhagen 
Melanchthon 



Church 






- 


School 







Later 

Reformation 

Period. 

Saxony 

Wiirtemberg 

Gotha 

Bavaria 



the ultimate fruition of which 
came first in German lands, 
and which was to be the great 
work of the nineteenth century. 
It was through the kingly or 
ducal headship of the Church, 
and through it of the educa- 
tional system of the kingdom 
or duchy, that the great edu- 
cational development in Wiir- 
temberg, Saxony, and Gotha 
was brought about by their rul- 
ers, and it was through the rul- 
ing princes that the German 
Universities were reformed ^ 
dnd the new Protestant uni- 
versities established.^ Even 
in Catholic States, as Bavaria, the German state-control idea 
took root early. Many of the important features of the modern 
German school systems are to be seen in their beginnings in these 
Lutheran state-church schools. 



GERMAN STATES 



German Schools 



Lutheran 
Church 



Catholic 
Church 



The 

Nineteenth 

Century 

Prussia 
Saxony 
Wurtembargf 
Bavaria 
Baden 



Fig. 96. Evolution of German 
State School Control 



2 . A nglican foundations 

The Reformation and education in England. The Reformation 
in England took a very different direction from what it did in 
Germany, and its educational results in consequence were very 
different. In England the reform movement was much more 
poHtical in character than in German lands. Henry VIII was no 
Protestant, in the sense that Luther or Calvin or Zwingli or Knox 

^ Wittenberg, founded in 1502 as a new-learning university, and in which Luther, 
Melanchthon, and Bugenhagen were professors, was the first of the universities to 
become Protestant. Gradually the other universities in Protestant Germany threw 
off their allegiance to the Pope, and took on that of the ruUng prince. 

" The first Protestant university to be founded was Marburg, in Hesse, in 1527. 
When this later went over to Calvinism, a new university was founded at Giessen, 
in 1607, by a migration of the Lutheran professors. Other Protestant universities 
founded were Konigsberg (1544) Jena (.1556), Helmstadt (1576), and the free-city 
universities of Altdorf (1573), Strassburg (1621), Rinteln (1621), Duisberg (1655) 
%nd Kiel (1665). The support of these came, to a considerable extent, from old mo- 
nastic or ecclesiastical foundations which had been dissolved after the Reformation 



320 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

was. He distrusted their teachings, and was always anxious to 
explain objections to the old faith. The people of England as a 
body, too, had been much less antagonized by the exactions of 
the Roman Church and the immoral lives of the monks and 
Roman clergy; the new learning had awakened there somewhat 
less of a spirit of moral and religious reform ; and the reformation 
movement of Luther, after a decade and a half, had roused no 
general interest. The change from the Roman Catholic faith 
to an independent English Church, when made, was in conse- 
quence much more nominal than had been the case in German 
lands. As a result the severance from Rome was largely carried 
out by the ruling classes, and the masses of the people were in 
no way deeply interested in it. The English National Church 
merely took over most of the functions formerly exercised by the 
Roman Church, in general the same priests remained in charge 
of the parish churches, and the church doctrines and church 
practices were not greatly altered by the change in allegiance. 
The changing of the service from Latin to English was perhaps the 
most important change. "> The English Church, in spirit and serv- 
ice, has in consequence retained the greatest resemblance to the 
Roman Catholic Church of any Protestant denomination. In 
particular, the Lutheran idea of personal responsibility for salva- 
tion, and hence the need of all being taught to read, made scarcely 
any impression in England. 

By the time of Elizabeth (i 558-1 603) it had become a settled 
conviction with the English as a people that the provision of edu- 
cation was a matter for the Church, and was no business of the 
State, and this attitude continued until well into the nineteenth 
century. The English Church merely succeeded the Roman 
Church in the control of education, and now licensed the teach- 
ers (R. 168), took their oath of allegiance (R. 167), supervised 
prayers (R. 169) and the instruction, and became very strict as 
to conformity to the new faith (Rs. 164-166), while the schools, 
aside from the private tuition and endowed schools, continued to 
be maintained chiefly from religious sources, charitable funds, 
and tuition fees. Private tuition schools in time flourished, and 
the tutor in the home became the rule with families of means. 
The poorer people largely did without schooling, as they had done 
for 'Centuries before. As a consequence, the educational results 
of the change in the headship of the Church relate almost entirely 
to grammar schools and to the universities, and not to elementary 



RESULTS AMONG ANGLICANS 



321 



education. The development of anything approaching a system 
of elementary schools for England was consequently left for 
the educational awakening of the 
latter half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. When this finally came the 
development was due to political 
and economic, and not to religious 
causes. 

The EngUsh Act of Supremacy 
(R. 153), which severed England 
from Rome, had been passed by 
parliament in 1534. In 1536 an 
English Bible was issued to the 
churches,^ the services were or- 
dered conducted in Enghsh, and 
in 1549 the Enghsh Prayer Book, 
Psalter, and Catechism were put 
into use. In 1538 the Enghsh Bi- 
ble was ordered chained in the 
churches,- that the people might 
read it (R. 170), and the people 
were ordered instructed in Enghsh 
in the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, 
and the Ten Commandments. The 
change of the service to Enghsh 
was perhaps the largest educational gain the masses of the 
people obtained as the result of the Reformation in England.^ 

Suppression of the monasteries and the founding of grammar 
schools. Between 1536 and 1539 the most striking result of the 
Reformation in England took place, — the dissolution of the 
rnonasteries. Their doubtful reputation enabled Henry and Par- 

1 This was in response to a petition to the King, nearly two years before. The 
King finally granted the request, "though maintaining that he was not compelled 
by God's Word to set forth the Scriptures in English, yet 'of his own KberaHty and 
goodness was and is pleased that his said loving subjects should have and read the 
same in convenient places and times.' " (Procter and Frere, History of the Book 
of Common Prayer, p. 30.) 

2 "The injunctions directed that 'a Bible of the largest volume in English '_ be 
set up in some convenient place in every church, where it might be read, only with- 
out noise, or disturbance of any public service, and \vithout any disputation, or 
exposition." {Ibid., p. 30.) 

^ The right to read the Bible was later revoked, during the closing years of 
Henry VIII's reign (d. 1547), by an act of Parliament, in 1543, which provided that 
"no woman (.unless she be a noble or gentle woman), no artificers, apprentices, 
journeymen, servingmen, under the degree of yeomen . . . husbandmen, or laborers " 
should read or use any part of the Bible under pain of fines and imprisonment. 




Fig. 97. A Chained Bible 

(Redrawn from an old print showing 
a chained Bible in a church in York, 
England) 



322 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

liament to confiscate their property, and "the dead hand of 
monasticism was removed from a third of the lands of England." 
There were precedents for this in pre-Reformation times, the 
church authorities themselves having converted several monastic 
foundations into grammar schools. At one blow Parliament now 
suppressed the monasteries of all England, some eight thousand 
monks and nuns were driven out, many of the monasteries, nun- 
neries, and abbey churches were destroyed, and the monastic 
lands were forfeited to the Crown. It was a ruthless proceeding, 
though in the long course of history beneficial to the nation. 
Much of the land was given to influential followers of the king in 
return for their support, and a large part of the proceeds from 
sales was spent on coast defenses and a navy, though more than 
was formerly thought to be the case was used in refounding gram- 
mar schools. A number of the monasteries were converted into 
collegiate churches, with schools attached. Some of the alms- 
houses and hospitals confiscated at the same time were similarly 
used, and the cathedral churches in nine EngHsh cities were taken 
from the monks (R. 171), who had driven out the regular clergy 
during the tenth to the tw'elfth centuries, and were refounded as 
cathedral church schools. The cathedral church school at Can- 
terbury, which Henry refounded in 1541 as a humanistic grammar 
school, with a song school attached, and for the government of 
which he made detailed provisions (R. 172), is typical of a school 
which had fallen into bad repute (R. 171), and was later refounded 
as a result of the confiscation of the monastic property. The 
College of Christ Church at Oxford, and Trinity College at Cam- 
bridge, were also richly endowed from the monastic proceeds. 

In 1546 another Act of Parliament vested the title of all chan- 
try foundations, some two hundred in number, in the Crown that 
they might be "altered, changed, and amended to convert them 
to good and godly uses as in the erecting of grammar schools," 
but so pressing became the royal need for money that, after their 
sale, the intended endowments were never made. As the song 
schools had been estabhshed originally to train a few boys "to 
help a priest sing mass," and as the service was now to be read 
rather than sung, the need for choristers largely disappeared. 
Being regarded as nurseries of superstition, they were abandoned 
without regret. 

Result of the Reformation in England. The result of the 
change in rehgious allegiance in England was a material decrease 




Plate 7. The Free School at Harrow 

One of the "Great Public" Grammar Schools of England. Founded in 1571, in 
the reign of Elizabeth; building finished in 1593. The names of famous "old 
boys" are seen lettered on the wall at the back. Pupils are seen seated in 
"forms," reciting to the masters. (From a picture published by Ackermann, in 
his illustrated History of the Colleges of Winchester, Eton, Westminster, etc. 
London, 1816.) 



RESULTS AMONG ANGLICANS 323 

in the number of places offering grammar-school advantages, 
though with a material improvement in the quality of the instruc- 
tion provided, and a consequent decrease in the number of boys 
given free education in the refounded grammar schools. As for 
elementary education, the abolition of the song, chantry, and 
hospital schools took away most of the elementary schools which 
had once existed. The clerk of the parish usually replaced them 
by teaching a certain number of boys "to read Enghsh inteUi- 
gently instead of Latin unintelligently," many new parish ele- 
mentary schools were created, especially during the reign of 
Elizabeth, and in time the dame school, the charity school, the 
writing school, and apprenticeship training arose (chapter xviii) 
and became regular English institutions. These types of school- 
ing constituted almost all the elementary-school advantages pro- 
vided in England until well into the eighteenth century. 

The post-Reformation educational energy of England was given 
to the founding of grammar schools, and during the century and 
a half before the outbreak of the struggle with James II (1688) to 
put an end in England for all time to the late-mediseval theory 
of the divine right of kings, a total of 558 grammar schools were 
founded or refounded.^ 

The grammar schools thus founded were, one and all, grammar 
schools of the reformed humanistic type. What was to be taught 
in them was seldom mentioned in the foundation articles, as it was 
assumed that every one knew what a grammar school was, so well 
by this time had the humanistic type become established. They 
were one and all modeled after the instruction first provided in 
Saint Paul's School (p. 275) in London, and such modifications 
as had been sanctioned with time, and this continued to be the 
type of English secondary school instruction until well into the 
nineteenth century. 

The dominating religious purpose. The religious conflicts fol- 
lowing the reformation movement everywhere intensified reli- 
gious prejudices and stimulated religious bigotry. This was soon 

1 These were, distributed by reigns, as follows: 

Henry VIII (1509-1547) 63 schools 

Edward VI (i547-i553) 5° " 

Mary (1553-1558) 19 " 

Elizabeth (,1558-1603) 138 " 

James I (1603-1625) 

Charles I (1625-1649) 142 " 

Protectorate (1649- 1660) 

Charles II (1660-1685) 

James II (1685-1688) 146 " 



324 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

reflected in the schools of all lands. In England, after the resto- 
ration under Catholic Mary (1553-58) and the final reestablish- 
ment of the English Church under Elizabeth (1558), all school 
instruction became narrowly religious and English Protestant In 
type. By the middle of the seventeenth century the grammar 
schools had become nurseries of the faith, as well as very formal 
and discipHnary in character. In England, perhaps more than in 
any other Protestant country, Christianity came to be identified 
with a strict conformity to the teachings and practices of the 
Established Church, and to teach that particular faith became 
one of the particular missions of all types of schools. Bishops 
were instructed to hunt out schoolmasters who were unsound in 
the faith (R. 164 a), and teachers were deprived of their positions 
for nonconformity (R. 164 b). More effectively to handle the 
problem a series of laws were enacted, the result of which was to 
institute such an inquisitorial policy that the position of school- 
master became almost intolerable. In 1580 a law (R. 165) im- 
posed a fine of £10 on any one employing a schoolmaster of 
unsound faith, with disability and imprisonment for the school- 
master so offending; in 1603 another law required a license from 
the bishop on the part of all schoolmasters as a condition prece- 
dent to teaching; in 1662 the obnoxious Act of Uniformity (R. 166) 
required every schoolmaster in any type of school, and all private 
tutors, to subscribe to a declaration that they would conform to 
the liturgy of the Church, as established by law, with fine and 
imprisonment for breaking the law; in 1665 the so-called "Five- 
Mile Act" forbade Dissenters to teach in any school, under pen- 
alty of a fine of £40; and in that same year bishops were instructed 
to see that 

the said schoolmasters, ushers, schoolmistresses, and instructors, or 
teachers of youth, publicly or privately, do themselves frequent the 
public prayers of the Church, and cause their scholars to do the same; 
and whether they appear well affected to the Government of his 
Majesty, and the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England. 

This attitude also extended upward to the universities as well, 
where nonconformists were prohibited by law (1558) from re- 
ceiving degrees, a condition not remedied until 187 1 (R. 305). 
^ The great purpose of instruction came to be to support the 
■ authority and the rule of the Established Church, and the almost 
complete purpose of elementary instruction came to be to train 
pupils to read the Catechism, the Prayer Book, and the Bible. 



RESULTS AMONG ANGLICANS 325 

This intense religious attitude in England was reflected in early 
colonial America, as we shall see in a following chapter. 

The Poor-Law legislation, and its educational significance. 
After the thirteenth century, due in part to the rise of the wool 
industry in Flanders, England began to change from a farming 
to a sheep-raising country. Accompanying this decline in the 
importance of farming there had been a slow but gradual growth 
of trade and manufacturing in the cities, and to the cities the sur- 
plus of rural peasantry began to drift. The cost of living also in- 
creased rapidly after the fifteenth century. As a result there was 
a marked shifting of occupations, much unemployment, and a 
constantly increasing number of persons in need of poor-relief. 
In the time of Elizabeth (1558-1603) it has been estimated that 
one half the population of England did not have an income suffi- 
cient for sustenance, and great numbers of children were running 
about without proper food or care, and growing up in idleness and 
vice. 

The situation, which had been growing worse for two centuries, 
culminated at the time of the Reformation when the religious 
houses, which had previously provided alms, were confiscated as 
a result of the reformation activities. The groundwork of the 
old system of religious charity was thus swept away, and the 
relation which had for so long existed between prayer and pen- 
ance and almsgiving and charity was altered. The nation was 
thus forced to deal with the problem of poor-relief, and with the 
care of the children of the poor. In the place of the old s5^stem 
the people were forced, by circumstances, to develop a new con- 
ception of the State as a community of peoples bound together 
by community interest, good feeling, charity, and service. 

As this new conception dawned on the English people, a series 
of laws were enacted which attempted to provide for the situation 
which had been created. These were progressive in character, 
and ranged over much of the sixteenth century. First the poor 
were restricted from begging, outside of certain specified limits. 
Next church collections and parish support for the poor were 
ordered (1553), and the people were to be urged to give. Then 
workhouses for the poor and their children, and materials with 
which to work, were ordered provided, and those persons of means 
who would not give freely were to be cited before the bishop first 
(R. 173), and the justices later, and if necessary forcibly assessed 
(1563). The next step was to permit the local authorities to 



326 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

raise needed funds by strictly local taxation (1572). In 1601 the 
last step was taken, when the compulsory taxation of all persons 
of property was ordered to provide the necessary poor- relief , and 
the excessive burdens of one parish were to be shared by neighbor- 
ing parishes. Thus, after a long period of slowly evolving legis- 
lation (R. 173), the English Poor-Law of 1601 (R. 174) finally 
gave expression to the following principles: 

1. The compulsory care of the poor, as an obligation of the State. 

2. The compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, male 
and female, to learn a useful trade. 

3. The obligation of the master to train his apprentices in a trade. 

4. The obligation of the overseers of the poor to supply, where neces- 
sary, the opportunity and the materials for such training of the 
children of the poor. 

5. The compulsory taxation of all persons of property to provide the 
necessary funds for such a purpose, and without reference to any 
benefits derived from the taxation. 

6. The excessive burdens of any one parish to be pooled throughout 
the hundred or county. 

In this compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, 
with the obligation imposed that such children must be trained 
in a trade and in proper living, with general taxation of those of 
property to provide workhouses and materials for such a purpose, 
we have the germ, among English-speaking peoples, of the idea 
of the general taxation of all persons by the State to provide 
schools for the children of the State. The apprenticing of the 
children of the poor to labor and the requirement that they be 
taught the elements of religion soon became a fi.xed English prac- 
tice (R. 217), and in the seventeenth century this idea was carried 
to the American colonies and firmly established there. It was 
on the foundations of the English Poor-Law of 1601, above stated, 
that the first Massachusetts law relating to the schooling of all 
children (1642) was framed (R. 190), but with the significant 
Calvinistic addition that: 

7. " In euery towne ye chosen men" shall see that parents and mas- 
ters not only train their children in learning and labor, but also 
" to read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall 
lawes of this country," with power to impose fines on such as 
refuse to render accounts concerning their children. 



RESULTS AMONG ANGLICANS 327 



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Why is progress that is substantial nearlj' always a product of slow rather 
than rapid evolution? 

2. Show why the evolution of many Protestant sects was a natural conse- 
quence of the position assumed by Luther. What is the ultimate out- 
come of the process? 

3. Why was it not important that more than a few be educated under the 
older theory of salvation? 

4. Show how modern democratic government was a natural consequence of 
the Protestant position. 

5. Why was universal education involved as a later but ultimate conse- 
quence of the position taken by the Protestants? 

6. Explain why the local Church authorities, before 1520, tried so hard to 
prevent the estabhshment of vernacular schools. 

7. Explain why the religious discussions of the Reformation should have 
so strongly stimulated a desire to read. 

8. Explain the fixing in character of the German, French, and English lan- 
guages by a single book. What had fixed the Italian? 

9. Was Luther probably right when he wrote, in 1524, that the schools 
"were deteriorating throughout Germany"? Why? 

10. Give reasons why Luther's appeals for schools were not more fruitful. 

11. What was the significance of the position of Luther for the future educa- 
tion of girls? 

12. Was Luther's idea that a clergyman should have had some experience as 
a teacher a good one, or not? Why? 

13. How do you explain Luther's ideas as to couphng up elementary and 
trade education in his primary schools? 

14. Point out the similarity of Luther's scheme for a school system with the 
German school system as finally evolved (Figure 96). 

15. Show how Melanchthon's Saxony Plan differed from Luther's ideas. 
For the times was it a more practical plan? Why? 

16. Explain why the Lutheran idea of personal responsibility for salvation 
made so little headway in England, and show that the natural educa- 
tional consequences of this resulted. 

17. Show what different conditions were likely to follow, in later centuries, 
from the different stands taken as to the relation of the State and Church 
to education by the German people by the middle of the sixteenth 
century, and by the English at the time of Elizabeth. 

18. Compare the origin of the vernacular elementary-school teacher in 
Germany and England. 

19. Leach estimates that, in 1546, there were approximately three hundred 
grammar schools in England for a total population of approximately 
two and one half millions. About what opportunities for grammar^ 
school education did this afford? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro 
duced : 

154. Rashdall: Diffusion of Education in Mediaeval Times. 

155. Times: The Vernacular Style of the Translation of the Bible. 

156. Luther: To the Mayors and Magistrates of Germany. 
15^7- Luther: Dignity and Importance of the Teacher's Work. 



328 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

158. Luther: On the Duty of Compelling School Attendance. 

159. Hamburg: An Example of a Lutheran Kirchenordnung. 

160. Brieg: An Example of a Lutheran Schuleordmmg. 

161. Melanchthon: The Saxony School Plan. 

162. Raumer: The School System EstabHshed in Wiirtemberg. 

163. Duke Ernest: The Schukmeihodus for Gotha. 

164. Strype: The Supervision of a Teacher's Acts and Religious Beliefs 
in England. 

(c) Letter of Queen's Council on. 

{b) Dismissal of a Teacher for non-conformity. 

165. Elizabeth: Penalties on Non-conforming Schoolmasters. 

166. Statutes: English Act of Uniformity of 1662. 

167. Carlisle: Oath of a Grammar School Master. 

168. Strype: An English Elementary-School Teacher's License. 

169. Cowper: Grammar School Statutes regarding Prayers. 

170. Green: Effect of the Translation of the Bible into Enghsh. 

171. Old MS.: Ignorance of the Monks at Canterbury and Messenden. 

172. Parker: Refounding of the Cathedral School at Canterbury, 

173. NichoUs: Origin of the English Poor-Law of 1601. 

174. Statutes: The English Poor Law of 1601. 



QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. From the selection from Rashdall (154), what do you infer as to the 
effect of the Reformation on the schools? What kind of schools does 
Rashdall describe as existing? 

2. Contrast the vernacular style of the Bible (155) with the Ciceronian. 

3. Characterize the three extracts (156-58) from Luther. 

4. How advanced was the ground taken by Luther (158)? Would we ac- 
cept the logic of his argument to-day? 

5. Just what do the Hamburg (159) and Brieg (160) Ordnungen indicate? 

6. Compare Melanchthon's Saxony Plan (161) with Sturm's (137) and the 
French College de Guyenne (136), and grade the three in order of im- 
portance. 

7. Show the close similarity of the Wiirtemberg plan of 1559-65 (162) and 
a modern German state school system. 

8. How advanced for the time was the work of Duke Ernest of Gotha 

9. What kind of a school attitude is indicated by the close supervision of 
Enghsh teachers, as described in 164 and 165? 

10. What would be the natural effect on the teaching occupation of such 
legislation as the Act of Uniformity (166)? 

11. Compare the form of hcense of an elementary teacher (168) with a 
modern form. What have we added and omitted? 

12. What do the statutes regarding prayers (169) indicate as to the nature 
of the grammar schools of the time? 

13. Characterize the educational importance of the translations of the Bible 
into the native tongues (170). 

14. What are the marked features of the refounding act (172) for Canter- 
bury cathedral school? What improvements are indicated? 

15. State the steps in the development (173) of the Enghsh Poor-Law of 
1601, just what the law provided for (174), and just what elements 
necessary to the creation of a state school system were incorporated 
into it. 



RESULTS AMONG ANGLICANS 329 



SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. 

Barnard, Henry. German Teachers and Educators. 

Francke, Kuno. Social Forces in German Literature. 
*Good, Harry E. "The Position of Luther upon Education," in School 

and Society, vol. 6, pp. 511-18 (Nov. 3, igiy). 
*IMontmorency, J. E. G. de. State Intervention in English Education. 
*Montmorency, J. E. G. de. The Progress of Education in England. 

Painter, F. V. N. Luther on Education. 

Paulsen, Fr. German Education. 

Richard, J. W. Philipp Melanchthon, the Protestant Preceptor of Germany 

Woodward, W. H. Education during the Renaissance. 



CHAPTER XIV 

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT 
REVOLTS 

II. AMONG CALVINISTS AND CATHOLICS 

3. Educational ivork of the Calvinists 

The organizing work of Calvin. From the point of view of 
American educational history the most important developments 
in connection with the Reformation were those arising from 
Calvinism. While the Calvinistic faith was rather grim and for- 
bidding, viewed from the modern standpoint, the Calvinists 
everywhere had a program for political, economic, and social 
progress which has left a deep impress on the history of mankind. 
This program demanded the education of all, and in the countries 
where Calvinism became dominant the leaders included general 
education in their scheme of religious, political, and social re- 
form.^ In the governmental program which Calvin drew up 
(1537) for the religious republic at Geneva (p. 298), he held that 
learning was "a public necessity to secure good political adminis- 
tration, sustain the Church unharmed, and maintain humanity 
among men." 

In his plan for the schools of Geneva, published in 1538, he out- 
lined a system of elementary education in the vernacular for all, 
which involved instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, reli- 
gion, careful grammatical drill, and training for civil as well as 
for ecclesiastical leadership. In his plan of 1541 he upholds the 
principle, as had Luther, that "the liberal arts and good training 
are aids to a full knowledge of the Word." This involved the 
organization of secondary schools, or colleges as he called them, 

^ "These Calvinists had a common program of broad scope — not merely doc- 
trinal, but also political, economic,- and social. Their common program and their 
social ideals demanded education of all as instruments of Providence for church and 
commonwealth. Their industrious habits and productive economic life provided 
funds for education. Their representative institutions in both chtirch and common- 
wealth not only necessitated general diffusion of knowledge, but furnished the organ- 
ization necessary for founding, supervising, and maintaining, in wholesome touch 
with the common man, both elementary and higher institutions of learning. Their 
disciplined and responsive conscience, their consequent intensity of moral conviction 
and spirit of self-sacrifice for the common weal, compelled them to realize, in con- 
crete and permanent form, their ideals of college and common school." (Foster, 
H. D., In Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, vol. i, p. 499.) 



RESULTS AMONG CALVINISTS 331 

following the French nomenclature, to prepare leaders for the 
ministry and the civil government through "instruction in the 
languages and humane science." In the colleges (secondary 
schools) which he organized at Geneva and in neighboring places 
to give such training, and which became models of their kind 
which were widely copied, the usual humanistic curriculum was 
combined with intensive religious instruction. These colleges 
became famous as institutions from which learned men came 
forth. The course of study in the seven classes of one of the 
Geneva colleges, which has been preserved for us, reveals the na- 
ture of the instruction (R. 175). The lowest class began with the 
letters, reading was taught from a French-Latin Catechism, and 
the usual Latin authors were read. Greek was begun in the 
fourth class, and, in addition to the usual Greek authors, the New 
Testament was read in Greek. In the higher classes, as was com- 
mon also in German gymnasia, logic and rhetoric were taught to 
prepare pupils to analyze, argue, and defend the faith. Elocu- 
tion was also given much importance in the upper classes as 
preparation for the ministry, two original orations being required 
each month. Psalms were sung, prayers offered, sermons 
preached and questioned on, and the Bible carefully studied. 
The men who went forth from the colleges of Geneva to teach and 
to preach the Calvinistic gospel were numbered by the hundreds.^ 
Calvin's great educational work at Geneva has been well sum- 
marized by a recent writer,- as follows: 

The strenuous moral training of the Genevese was an essential part 
of Calvin's work as an educator. All were trained to respect and obey 
laws, based upon Scripture, but enacted and enforced by representa- 
tives of the people, and without respect of persons. How fully the 
training of children, not merely in sound learning and doctrine, but 
also in manners, "good morals," and common sense was carried out is 
pictured in the delightful human Colloquies of Calvin's old teacher, 
Corderius (once a teacher at the College of Guyenne, p. 269), whom he 
twice established at Geneva. . . . 

Calvin's memorials to the Genevan magistrates, his drafts for civil 
law and municipal administration, his correspondence with reformers 
and statesmen, his epoch-making defense of interest taking, his growing 
tendency toward civil, religious, and economic liberty, his development 
of primary and university education, his intimate knowledge of the 
dialect and ways of thought of the common people of Geneva, and his 

1 In 1625 a list of the famous men of the city of Louvain, in Belgium, was printed 
More than one fourth of those listed had studied in the colleges of Geneva. 

2 Foster, H. D., Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, vol. i, p. 491. 



332 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



broad understanding of European princes, diplomats, and politics mark 
him out as a great political, economic, and educational as well as a 
religious reformer, a constructive social genius capable of reorganizing 
and moulding the whole life of a people. 

The world owes much to the constructive, statesman-like gen- 
ius of Calvin, and those who followed him, and we in America 
probably most of all. Geneva became a refuge for the persecuted 
Protestants from other lands, and through such influences the 
ideas of Calvin spread to the Huguenots in France, the Walloons 




Fig. 98. A French School of the Seventeenth Century 
(From an old woodcut by Abraham Bosse, 161 1-78) 



of the Dutch and Belgian Netherlands, the Germans in the Pa- 
latinate, the Presbyterians of Scotland, the Puritans in England^ 
and later to the American colonies. 

Calvinism in other lands. The great educational work done by 
the Calvinists in France, in the face of heavy persecution, de- 
serves to be ranked with that of the I^utherans in Germany in its 
importance. Had the Calvinists had the same opportunity for 
free development the Lutherans had, and especially their state 
support, there can be little doubt that their work would have 
greatly exceeded the Lutherans in importance and influence on 
the future history of mankind. Beginning with one church in 
1538, they had 2150 churches by 1561, when the severe persecu- 
tions and religious wars began. 



RESULTS AMONG CALVINISTS 333 

True to the Calvinistic teaching of putting principles into 
practice^ the^rganized an extensive system of schools, extending 
f rom ^mentary education for all, through secondary schools or 
colleges,lip to eight Huguenot universities. As a people they 
were thrifty and capable of making great sacrifices to carry out 
their educational ideals. The education they provided was not 
only religious but civil; not only intellectual but moral, social, 
and economic. Education was for all, rich and poor alike. Their 
synods made liberal appropriations for the universities, while 
municipahties provided for colleges and elementary education. 
They emphasized, in the lower schools, the study of the vernacu-^ 
lar and arithmetic, and in the colleges Greek and the New Testa- 
ment. The long hst of famous teachers found in their universi- 
ties reveals the character of their instruction. Foster has well 
summarized the distinguishing characteristics of Huguenot edu- 
cation in France, before they were driven from the land, as fol- 
lows: ^ 

The significant characteristics of Huguenot education were: an 
emphasis on the education of the laity; training for "the republic" and 
"society" as well as for the Church; insistence upon virtue as well as 
knowledge; the wide-spread demand for education, and a view of it 
as essential to liberty of conscience; a comprehensive working system 
of elementary, collegiate, and university training for all, poor as well 
as rich; an astonishing familiarity with Scripture, even among the 
lowest classes; utilization of representative church organization for 
founding, supporting, and unifying education; readiness to sacrifice 
for education, a spirit of carrying a thing through at any cost; business- 
like supervision of money, and systematic supervision of both profes- 
sors and students; a notable emphasis on vernacular, arithmetic, Greek, 
use of full texts, and libraries; and finally a progressive spirit of inquiry 
and investigation. 

In the Palatinate (see map, Figure 8^) some progress in found- 
ing churches and schools was made, especially about Strassburg, 
and the universities of Heidelberg and Marburg became the cen- 
ters of Huguenot teaching. In the Dutch Netherlands, and in 
that part of the Belgian Netherlands inhabited by the Walloons, 
Calvinist ideas as to education dominated. The universities of 
Leyden (f. 1575), Groningen (f. 1614), Amsterdam (f. 1630), and 
Utrecht (f. 1636) were CaKinistic, and closely in touch with the 
Calvinists and Huguenots of German lands and France. Popu- 
lar education was looked after among these people as it was in 
* In Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, vol. i, p. 498. 



334 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Calvinistic France and Geneva. The Church S3m.od of The 
Hague (1586) ordered the estabhshment of schools in the cities, 
and in 1618 the Great Synod held at Dort (R. 176) ordered that: 

Schools in which the young shall be properly instructed in piety and 
fundamentals of Christian doctrine shall be instituted not only in 
cities, but also in towns and country places where heretofore none have 
existed. The Christian magistracy shall be requested that honorable 
stipends be provided for teachers, and that well-qualified persons may 
be employed and enabled to devote themselves to that function; and 
especially that the children of the poor may be gratuitously instructed 
by them and not be excluded from the benefits of schools. 

Further provisions were made as to the certificating of school- 
masters, and the pastors were made superintendents of the 

schools, to visit, exam- 
ine, encourage, advise, 
and report (R. 176). 
-Provision for the free 
edu£ation_ofjthe_poor 
became common, and 
elementary education 
was made accessible to 
all. The careful pro- 
vision for education 
made by the province 
of Utrecht (1590, 1612) 
(R. 178) was typical of 
Dutch activity. The 
province of Drenthe 
ordered (1630) a school 
tax paid for all children 
over seven, whether at- 
tending school or not. 
The province of Over- 
yssel levied (1666) a 
school tax for all chil- 
dren from eight to 
twelve years of age. The province of Groningen constituted the 
pastors the attendance officers to see that the children got to 
school. Amsterdam and many other Dutch cities demanded an 
examination of all teachers before being licensed to teach. By 
the middle of the seventeenth century a good system of schools 




I'lG. yo. A Ditch X'illai'.e School 

(After a painting by Adrian Ostade, dated 1662, 
now in the Louvre, at Paris) 




RESULTS AMONG CALVINISTS 335 

seems to have been provided generally ^ by the Dutch and the 
Belgian Walloons (R. 178). That the teaching of rehgion was 
the main function of the Dutch elementary schools, as of all 
other vernai:ttla:F-sehools of the time, is seen from the official lists 
of the textbooks used (R. 178). 

^' John Knox, the leader of the Scottish Reformation (1560), who 
had spent some time at Geneva and who was deeply impressed by 
the Calvinistic religious-state found there, introduced the Calvin- 
istic religious and educational ideas into Scotland. His Book oj 
Discipline for the Scottish Church (1560), 
framed closely on the Genevan model, con- 
tained a chapter devoted to education in 
which he proposed : 

That everie severall churche have a school- 
maister appointed, such a one as is able at 
least to teach Grammar and the Latin tung, 
yf the TowTi be of any reputation. Yf it be 
upaland . . . then must either the Reider or 
the Minister take cayre over the children . . . '^-^ij;}^ 'H\'''-Mf^^,-r'1 
to instruct them in their first rudementie and I '(■,\'^\t''^'^' v'?-'; 7 
especially in the catechisme. ^ ' -'i'^P/'YV ' / 

The educational plan proposed by Knox ^ 
, , , T, , r 1 ,. Fig. 100. John Knox 

would have called for a large expenditure (-j^Q.p_^2) 

of money, and this the thrifty Scotch were 

not ready for. Knox and his followers then proposed to endow the 
new schools from the old church and monastic foundations, but 
the Scottish nobles hoped to share in these, as had the English 
nobility under Henry VIII, and Knox's plan was not approved. 
This delayed the estabHshment of a real national system of educa- 
tion for Scotland until the nineteenth century. The new Church, 
however, took over the superintendence of education in Scotland, 
and when parish schools were finally established by decree of the 
Privy Council, in 161 6, and by the legislation of 1633 and 1646 
(R. 179), the Church was given an important share in their organi- 
zation and management. These schools, while not always sufifi- 
cient in number to meet the educational needs, were well taught, 
and have deeply influenced the national character. 

^ "That public schools abounded throughout the Netherlands is evident. Every 
study of the archives of town or province discloses their presence. The minutes of 
every religious body bear overwhelming testimony not only to the existence of 
schools, but also a zealous interest in their maintenance." (Kilpatrick, W. H., 
Dutch Schools of New Netherlands, p. 37.) " 



336 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

4 

4. The Counter-Reformation of the Catholics 

The Jesuit Order. The Protestant Revolt made but little 
headway in Italy, Spain, Portugal, much of France, or southern 
Belgium (see map, p. 296). Italy was scarcely disturbed at all, 
while in France, where of all these countries the reform ideas had 
made greatest progress, nine tenths of the people remained loyal 
to Rome. In a general way it may be stated that those parts of 
western Europe which had once formed an integral part of the old 
Roman Empire remained loyal to the Roman Church, while those 
which had been the homes of the Germanic tribes revolted. Now 
it naturally happened that the countries which remained loyal to 
the old Church experienced none of the feelings of the necessity 
for education as a means to personal salvation which the Luther- 
ans and Calvinists felt. There, too, the church system of educa- 
tion which had developed during the long Middle Ages remained 
undisturbed and largely unchanged. The Church as an institu- 
tion, though, learned from the Protestants the value of education 
as a means to larger ends, and soon set about using it.^ 

After the Church Council of Trent (1545-63), where definite 
church reform measures were carried through (p. 303), the Catho- 
lics inaugurated what has since been called a counter-reforma- 
tion, in an effort to hold lands which were still loyal and to win 
back lands which had been lost. Besides reforming the practices 
and outward lives of the churchmen, and reforming some church 
practices and methods, the Church inaugurated a campaign of 
educational propaganda. In this last the chief rehance was upon 
a new and a very useful organization oflticially known as the "So- 
ciety of Jesus," but more commonly called the ''Jesuit Order." 
This had been founded, in 1534, by a Spanish knight, pilgrim, 
man of large ideas, and scholar by the name of Ignatius Loyola, 
and had been sanctioned as an Order of the Church by Pope Paul 
III, in 1540. It was organized along strictly military lines, all 
members being responsible to its General, and he in turn alone to 
the Pope. The quiet life of the cloister was abandoned for a life 

1 For long the Church had had the Inquisition, but, while it had rendered loyal 
and iniquitous service, the results had been in no way commensurate with the bitter 
hatred which its work awakened. Excommunication, persecution, imprisonment, 
the stake, and the sword had been tried extensively, but with only partial success. 
In education the reformers had shown the Church a new method, which was positive 
and effective and did not awaken opposition, and from the reformer's zeal for Latin 
grammar schools to provide an intelligent ministry the Church took its cue of estab- 
lishing schools to train its future leaders. It was a long-headed and far-sighted 
plan, and its success was proportionately large. 




COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 337 

of open warfare under a military discipline. The Jesuit was to 
live in the world, and all peculiarities of dress or rule which might 
prove an obstacle to worldly success were suppressed. The pur- 
poses of the Order were to combat heresy, to advance the interests 
of the Church, and to strengthen the' au- 
thority of the Papacy. Its motto was 
Omnia ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (that is, 
All for the greater glory of God), and the 
means to be employed by it to accomplish 
these.ends were the pulpit, the confessional, 
the mission, and the school. Of these the 
school was given the place of first impor- 
tance. Realizing clearly that the real cause 
of the Reformation had been the ignor- ///''///(■ ^o'//y/ 
ance, neglect, and vicious lives of so many // /' ;/' ''' y 
monks and priests and the extortion and ' 
neglect practiced by the Church, and that ^ig. ioi. Ignatius de 
,1^ , . f ,.«; ,. -^ . ,, , . V 1 Loyola (1491-1 556) 

the chief diracuJty was m the higher places 

of authority, it became the prime principle of the Order to live 
upright and industrious lives themselves, and to try to reach and 
train those likely to be the future leaders in Church and State. 
With the education of the masses of the people the Order was not 
concrrned.^ Our interest Hes only with the educational work of 
this Order, a work in which it was remarkably successful and 
through which it exercised a very large influence. 

Great success of the Order. The service of the Order to the 
Church in combating Protestant heresies was very marked. Be- 
ginning in a small way, the Order, by 1600, had established two 
hundred colleges (Latin secondary schools), universities, and 
training seminaries; by 1640, 372; by 1706 (150 years after the 
death of its founder), 769; and by 1756, 728. In 1773, when the 
Order was for a time abohshed,- after it had been driven out of a 

^ This is not true of their missions in foreign lands, where the mission priests 
usually gave elementary instruction. Elementary schools were maintained in the 
Jesuit missions of North and South America. Thus a mission school was estab- 
lished at Quebec as early as 1635 , and 'one at Newtown, in Catholic Maryland, in 1640. 
After 1740 elementary parish schools were opened by the Jesuits among the German 
Catholics in Pennsylvania. From these beginnings Catholic parish schools have 
been developed in the United States. 

2 The Order was reestablished in 18 14 and it has since been allowed to reestabhsh 
itself in most countries, though not in France or Germany. There are 41 Jesuit 
colleges in America, in 21 states. (For list see Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, 
vol. Ill, p. 540.) In the revision of its course of instruction, in 1832, modern studies 
were added, but the Society has never played any such conspicuous part in education 
since its reestablishment as it did during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 



338 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

number of European countries because of the unscrupulous meth- 
ods it adopted and the continual application of its doctrine that 
the end justifies the means, the Order had 22,589 members, about 
half of whom were teachers. Its colleges (secondary schools) and 
universities were most numerous and its work most energetically 
carried on in northern France, Belgium, Holland, the German 
States, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, Here was the great battle 
line, and here the Jesuits deeply entrenched themselves. In 
these portions of Europe alone there were, in 1750, 217 colleges, 
55 seminaries, 24 houses for novitiates, and 160 missions. In 
France alone there were 92 colleges. They did much, single- 
handed, to roll back the tide of Protestantism which had ad- 
vanced over half of western Europe, and to hold other countries 
true to the ancient faith. 

The colleges were usually large and well-supported institutions, 
with dormitories, classrooms, dining-halls and play-grounds. 
The usual number of scholars in each was about 300, though 
some had an attendance of 600 to 800, and a few as high as 
2000. At their period of maximum influence the colleges and 
universities of the Order probably enrolled a total of 200,000 
students. Their graduates were prominent in every scholarly 
and governmental activity of the time. As far as possible the 
pupils were a selected class to whom the Order offered free in- 
struction. The children of the nobihty and gentry, and the 
brightest and most promising youths of the different lands were 
drawn into their schools. The children of many Protestants, 
also, were attracted by the high quality of the instruction offered. 
There they were given the best secondary-school education of the 
time, and received, at an impressionable age, the peculiar Jesuit 
stamp. ^ Bacon gave his opinion as to the success of their in- 
struction in the following sentence: "As for the pedagogical part, 
the shortest rule would be. Consult the schools of the Jesuits; for 
nothing better has been put in practice." {De Augmentis, vi, 4.)^ 

1 It is an interesting speculation as to whether the fact that the Jesuits made 
such headway in German lands, and so deeply impressed their training on the chil- 
dren of the nobility there, had any connection with the attitude of German and 
Austrian political leaders in their governmental and poUtical policies up to the time 
of the World War. 

2 By the middle of the eighteenth century the Jesuits had lost much of their former 
vigor, and their colleges their former large influence. They had become powerful 
and arrogant, mixed deeply in political intrigues, quarreled with any one who crossed 
their path, and refused to change their instruction to meet new intellectual needs. 
They were finally driven from France, Spain, Portugal, and German lands, and were 
ultimately abolished as an Order. 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 339 

Success of the Jesuit schools. Displaying a genius for organi- 
zation worthy of Rome, Loyola and his followers absorbed the 
best educational ideas of the time as to school organization and 
management and curriculum, and incorporated these into their 
educational plan. Too practical to make many changes, but 
with a keen eye for what was best, they accepted the best and 
used it much as others had worked it out. From the municipal 
college of Guyenne (p. 269), the colleges of Calvin (p. 331), and 
Sturm's organization at Strassburg (p. 273), they adopted the 
plan of class organization, with a teacher for each class. From 
the Calvinists they obtained the idea of the careful supervision of 
instruction, which was worked out in the Prefect of Studies for 
their colleges. In their course of study they incorporated the Cic- 
eronian ideal of the humanistic learning, and as careful religious 
instruction as was provided by any of the reformers. From the 
Italian court schools they took the idea of physical training. The 
method of instruction and classroom management which they 
worked out was detailed, practical, and for their purposes excel- 
lent. The reasons for their educational work gave them a clearly 
defined aim and purpose. The military brotherhood type of or- 
ganization, the lifetime of celibate ser\ice, and the opportunity to 
sort the carefully selected members according to their ability for 
service in the different lines of the Order gave them the best-se- 
lected teaching force in Europe, and these men they trained for 
the teaching service with a thoroughness unknown before and 
seldom equaled since. Knowing why they were at work and what 
ends they should achieve, intolerant of opposition, intensely 
practical in all their work, and possessed of an indefatigable zeal 
in the accomphshment of their purpose, they gave Europe in gen- 
eral and northern continental Europe in particular a system of 
secondary schools and universities possessed of a high degree of 
effectiveness, which, combined with religious warfare and perse- 
cution, in time drove out or dwarfed all competing institutions in 
the countries they were able to control. 

That their educational system, viewed from a modern liberal- 
education standpoint, equaled in effectiveness for liberal-educa- 
tion ends such institutions as the court schools of Vittorino da 
Feltre, Battista da Guarino, or other Itahan humanistic educators 
of the Renaissance (p. 267) ; the French and Swiss colleges of Cal- 
vin (p. 331); Colet's school at Saint Paul's (p. 275), and the better 
English grammar schools; or the schools of the Brethren of the 



340 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Common Life in the Netherlands (p. 271); would hardly be con- 
tended for to-day. Such, though, was not their purpose. To 
proselyte for the Church rather than to liberalize — from their 
point of view there had been too much liberalizing already — was 
their ultimate aim, and their educational work was organized to 
suppress rather than to awaken more Protestant heresy. The 
work of this Order was so successful, and for two centuries so 
dominated secondary and higher education in Europe, that it will 
pay us to examine a little more closely their educational organiza- 
tion to see more fully the reasons for their large success. In so 
doing we will examine three points — their school organization, 
their methods of instruction, and the training of their teachers. 

Jesuit school organization. Each college was presided over by 
a Rector, who was in effect the president of the institution, and a 
Prefect of Studies, who was the superintendent of instruction. 
Below these were the Professors or teachers, the House Prefect, 
the official disciplinarian of the institution, known as the Correc- 
tor, the monitors, and the students. There were two classes of 
students, interns and externs. Their schools were divided into 
two courses. The studia inferiora, or lower school, which covered 
the six years from ten to twelve years of age up to sixteen to eight- 
een; and the studia superior a, which followed, and included the 
higher college and university courses, with philosophy and theol- 
ogy as the important subjects. For the whole, there was a very 
carefully worked-out manual of instruction (R. 180) known as the 
Ratio Studioruni} 

The boy entering a Jesuit college was supposed to have previ- 
ously learned how to read Latin. The first three years were 
given to learning Latin grammar and a little Greek. In the 
fourth year Latin and Greek authors were begun, and in the fifth 
and sixth years a rhetorical study of the Latin authors was made. 
Latin was the language of the classroom and the playground as 
well, the mother tongue being used only by permission. Greek 
was studied through the medium of the Latin. The retention of 
Latin as the language of all scholarly and political intercourse, 
and the cultivation of the style and speech of Cicero as the stand- 
ard of purity and elegance, were the ends aimed at. Careful at- 

1 The care with which the Ratio Sliidiorum was worked out is typical of the thor- 
oughness of the Order. A prehminary outline of work was followed for many years, 
the whole being experimental. Reports on it were made, and finally a preliminary 
Ratio was issued, in 1586. This was again revised and cast into final form, in 1599. 
\a this form it remained until 1832, when some modern studies were added. 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 341 

tention was given to the health and sports of the pupils, and spe- 
cial regard was paid to moral and religious training. 

Following this lower school of six years came the so-called 
philosophical course of three years (sometimes two) . The study 
of the Latin classics and rhetoric was continued, and dialectics 
(logic) and some metaphysics were added. The nine years to- 
gether covejed about the same scope as Sturm's school (R. 137) at 
Strassburg (p. 273), but was more formal in character and 
partook more of the nature of the later formalized humanistic 
schools. Slight variations were allowed in places, to meet par- 
ticular local needs, but this course of study remained practically 
unchanged until 1832, when some history, geography, and ele- 
mentary mathematics and science were added to the lower schools, 
and advanced mathematics and science to the philosophical 
course. In 1906 each Province of the Order was permitted to 
change the Ratio further, if necessary to adjust it better to local 
needs. Above the philosophical course a course of four or six 
years in philosophy and theology prepared for the higher work of 
the Order, the four-year course for preaching and the six-year 
course for teaching. 

Jesuit school methods. The characteristic method of the 
schools was oral, with a consequent closeness of contact of teacher 
and pupils. This closeness of contact and sympathy was further 
retained by the system whereby all punishment was given by the 
official Corrector of the institution. Their method, like that of 
the modern German VolkscJiule, was distinctly a teaching and 
not a questioning method. The teacher planned and gave the 
instruction; the pupils received it. In the upper classes the 
teacher explained the general meaning of the entire passage ; then 
the construction of each part; then gave the historical, geographi- 
cal, and archaeological information needed further to explain the 
passage; then called attention to the rhetorical and poetical 
forms and rules; then compared the style with that of other writ- 
ers; and finally drew the moral lesson. The memory was drilled; 
but little training of the judgment or understanding was given. 
Thoroughness, memory drills, and the disciplinary value of stud- 
ies were foundation stones in the Jesuit's educational theory. 
Repetition, they said, was the mother of memory. Each day the 
work of the previous day was reviewed, and there were further 
reviews at the end of each week, month, and year. 

To retain the interest of the pupils amid such a load of memoriz- 



342 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



ing various school devices were resorted to, chief among which 
were prizes, ranks, emulations, rivals, and public disputations. 
The system of rivals, whereby each boy had an opponent con- 
stantly after him, as shown in Figure 102, was one of the peculiar 
features of their schools. While the schools were said to have 
been made pleasant and attractive, the idea of the absolute au- 



X X X X 



B 



1 I 1 I 



1234 5C789 



987654321 



I I I 1 



Fig. 102. Plan of a Jesuit Schoolroom 

The pupils were arranged in equal numbers in opposite rows, known 
as decurice, and designated by the numbers. Each boy in each row 
had a "rival" in the similarly numbered opposite row (one pair is 
designated by dots), who rose whenever he was called on to recite, 
and who tried to correct him in some error. A monitor for each 
group sat at C, and the regular teacher at 5. A,D, E, i, 0, and x 
represent various student officials. 

thority of the Church which they represented pervaded them and 
repressed the development of that individuality which the court 
schools of the ItaUan Renaissance, the schools of the northern 
humanists, and the Calvinistic colleges had tried particularly to 
foster. This, however, is a criticism made from a modern point 
of view. That the school represented well the spirit of the times 
is indicated by their marked success as teaching institutions. 

Training of the Jesuit teacher. The newest and the most dis- 
tinguishing feature of the Jesuit educational scheme, as well as 
the most important, was the care with which they selected and 
the thoroughness with which they trained their teachers. To be- 
gin with, every Jesuit was a picked man, and of those who entered 
the Order only the best were selected for teaching. Each entered 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 343 

the Order for life, was vowed to celibacy, poverty, chastity, up- 
rightness of life, and absolute obedience to the commands of the 
Order. The six-year inferior course had to be completed, which 
required that the boy be sixteen to eighteen years of age before he 
could take the preliminary steps toward joining the Order. Then 
a two-year novitiate, away from the world, followed. This was a 
trial of his real character, his weak points were noted, and his will 
and determination tested. Many were dismissed before the end 
of the novitiate. If retained and accepted, he took the prelimi- 
nary vows and entered the philosophical course of study. On 
completing this he was from twenty-one to twenty-three years of 
age. He was now assigned to teach boys in the inferior classes of 
some college, and might remain there. If destined for higher 
work he taught in the inferior classes for two or three years, and 
then entered the theological course at some Jesuit university. 
This required four years for those headed for the ministry, and six 
for those who were being trained for professorships in the col- 
leges. On completing this course the final vows were taken, at an 
age of from twenty-nine to thirty-two. The training to-day is 
still longer. To become a teacher in the inferior classes required 
training until twenty-one at least, and for college (secondary) 
classes training until at least twenty-nine. The training was in 
scholarship, religion, theology, and an apprenticeship in teaching, 
and was superior to that required for a teaching license in any 
Protestant country of Europe, or in the Catholic Church itself 
outside of the Jesuit Order. 

With such carefully selected and well-educated teachers, them- 
selves models of upright life in an age when priests and monks 
had been careless, it is not surprising that they wielded an influ- 
ence wholly out of proportion to their numbers, and supplied 
Europe with its best secondary schools during the seventeenth 
and early eighteenth centuries. In the loyal Catholic countries 
they were virtually the first secondary schools outside of the mon- 
asteries and churches, and the real introduction of humanism into 
Spain, Portugal, and parts of France came with the establish- 
ment of the Jesuit humanistic colleges. For their schools they 
wrote new school books — the Protestant books, the most cele- 
brated of which were those of Erasmus, Melanchthon, Sturm, and 
Lily, were not possible of use — and for a time they put new life 
into the humanistic type of education. Before the eighteenth 
century, however, their secondary schools had become as formal 



344 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

as had those in Protestant lands (R. 146), and their universities 
far more narrow and intolerant. 

The elements of strength and weakness in the Jesuit system of 
education has been well summarized by Dabney,^ in the following 
words: 

The order of the Jesuits was anti-democratic, and was founded to 
uphold authority, and to antagonize the right of private judgment. 
With masterly skill they ruled the Catholic world for about two centu- 
ries; and, in the beginning of their activity, performed services of great 
value to mankind. For, although they aimed, in their system of edu- 
cation, to fit pupils merely for so-called practical avocations, and to 
avoid all subjects likely to stimulate them to independent thought, it 
was nevertheless the best system which had then appeared. In drop- 
ping the old scholastic methods, and teaching new and fresher subjects, 
although with the intention of perverting them to their own ends, they 
sowed, in fact, the germs of their OMai decay. In spite of their wonder- 
ful organization, and their indefatigable industry as courtiers in royal 
palaces, as professors in the universities, as teachers in the schools, as 
preachers, as confessors, and as missionaries, they were utterly unable 
to crush the spirit of doubt and inquiry. During the first half century 
of their existence they were intellectually in advance of their age; but 
after that they gradually dropped behind it, and, instead of diffusing 
knowledge, saw that the only hope of retaining their dominion was to 
oppose it with all their might. 

The Church and elementary education. As was stated on a 
preceding page, the countries which remained loyal to the Church 
experienced none of the Protestant feeling as to the necessity for 
universal education for individual salvation. In such lands the 
church system of education which had grown up during the 
Middle Ages remained undisturbed, and was expanded but slowly 
with the passage of time. The Church, never having made gen- 
eral provision for education, was not prepared for such work. 
Teachers were scarce, there was no theory of education except 
the religious theory, and few knew what to do or how to do it- 
Many churchmen, too, did not see the need for doing anything, 
Nevertheless the Church, spurred on by the new demands of a 
world fast becoming modern, and by the exhortations of the 
official representatives of the people,^ now began to make extra 
efforts, in the large cathedral cities, to remedy the deficiency of 

1 Dabney, R. H., The Causes of the French Revolution, p. 203. 

2 For example, the "States-General" of France met four times during the seven- 
teenth century, with weighty problems of religion and state for consideration, yet 
in three of the four meetings resolutions were passed urging the clergy to estabhsh 
schoolmasters in all the towns and villages, and a general system of compulsory 
education for all. 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 345 

more than a thousand years. In Paris, for example, which was 
typical of other French cities, the Church organized a regular 
system of elementary schools, with teachers licenced by the Pre- 
centor of the cathedral of Notre Dame and nominally under his 
supervision, in which instruction was offered to children of the 
artisan and laboring classes, of both sexes, "in reading, writing, 
reckoning, the rudiments of Latin Grammar, Catechism, and 
singing." By 1675 these "Little Schools" in Paris came to con- 
tain "upwards of 5000 pupils, taught by some 330 masters and 
mistresses." All such schools, of course, remained under the 
immediate control of the Church, and modern state systems of edu- 
cation in the CathoHc States are late nineteenth-century produc- 
tions. In Spain, Portugal, Poland, and the Balkan States, general 
state systems of education have not even as yet been evolved. 

The general effect of the Reformation, though, was to stimu- 
late the Church to greater activity in elementary, as well as in 
secondary and higher education. In the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries we find a large number of decrees by church 
councils and exhortations by bishops urging the extension of the 
existing church system of education, so as to supply at least reli- 
gious training to all the children of the faithful. As a result a 
number of teaching orders were organized, the aim of which was to 
assist the Church in providing elementary and rehgious education 
for the children of the laboring and artisan classes in the cities. 

Teaching orders established. The teaching orders for ele- 
mentary education, founded before the eighteenth century, with 
the dates of their foundation, were: 

*i535 — The Order of Ursulines. (U.S., 1729.) 

1592 — The Congregation of Christian Doctrine. 
*i598 — The Sisters of Notre Dame. (U.S., 1847.) 
*i6io — The Visitation Nuns. (U.S., 1799.) 
162 1 — Patres piarum scholarum (Piarists). First school opened 

in 1597; authorized by the Pope, 1662. 
1627 — The Daughters of the Presentation. 
*i633 — The Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. (U.S., 

1809.) 
^"1637 — The Port Royalists (Jansenists). (Suppressed in 1661.) 

1643 — The Sisters of Providence. 
*i65o — The Sisters of Saint Joseph. Rule based on Jesuits. 
(U.S., 19th C.) 
1652 — The Sisters of Mary of Saint Charles Borromeo. 
1684 — The Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin. 
\;^'684 — The Brothers of the Christian Schools. (U.S., 1845.) 

• Have communities in the United States, the date being that of the first one established. See 
iSlonroe, Cyclopedia of Education, vol. v,-p. 528. 



346 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



All of these, except the Ursulines and the Piarists, were founded 
in France, many of them originating in Paris. The first has long 
been prominent in Italy, and is now found in all lands. The 
second was founded by Father Cesar de Bus, 
at Cavaillon, Avignon, in southern France, and 
its purpose was to teach the Catechism to the 
young. The catechetical schools of this Order 
were prominent in southern France up to the 
time of the French Revolution. The third 
was founded by the Blessed Peter Fourier 
(i 565-1640), in 1598, and played an important 
part in the education of girls in France, par- 
ticularly in Lorraine, where Calvinism had 
made much headway. This noted Order of- 
fered free instruction to tradesmen's daughters, 
not only in religion but in "that which con- 
cerns this present life and its maintenance" 
as well. The girls were taught "reading, writ- 
ing, arithmetic, sewing, and divers manual arts, 
honorable and peculiarly suitable for girls" of 
their station of life. At a time when handwork 
had not been thought of for boys, the begin- 
nings of such work were here introduced for 
girls. In 1640 Fourier gave the sisterhood a 
constitution and a rule, which were revised and perfected in 1694. 
In this he laid down rules for the organization and management of 
schools, methods of teaching the different branches, and provided 
for a rudimentary form of class organization. The following 
extract from the Rule illustrates the approach to class organiza- 
tion which he devised: 

The inspectress, or mistress of the class, shall endeavor, as far as it 
possibly can be carried out, that all the pupils of the same mistress 
have each the same book, in order to learn and read therein the same 
lesson; so that, whilst one is reading hers in an audible and intelligible 
voice before the mistress, all the others, following her and following 
this lesson, in their books at the same time, may learn it sooner, more 
readily, and more perfectly.^ 

The Piarists were established in Italy, the first school being 
opened in Rome, in 1597, by a Spanish priest who had studied at 




P'iG. 103. 

An Ursuline 
Order founded, 1535 



^ Les vrais Constitutions des Religieuses de la Congregation de Nostre Dame, chap. 
XI. sec. 6, 2d ed., Toul, 1694. 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 347 

Lerida, Valencia, and Alcala. Being struck by the lack of educa- 
tional opportunities for the poor, he opened a free school for their 
instruction. By 1606 he had 900 pupils in his schools, and by 
1613 he had 1200. In 1621 Pope Gregory XV gave his work 
definite recognition by establishing it a teaching Order for ele- 
mentary (reading, writing, counting, religion) education, modeled 
on that of the Jesuits. The Order did some work in Italy and 
Spain, but its chief services were in border Cathohc lands. In 
1631 it began work in Moravia, in 1640 in Bohemia, in 1642 in 
Poland, and after 1648 in Austria and Hungary. The members 
wore a habit much like that of the Jesuits, had a scheme of studies 
similar to their Ratio, and were organized by provinces and were 
under discipline as were the members of the older Order. 

The Jansenists, founded by Saint Cyran, at Port Royal, con- 
ducted a very interesting and progressive educational experi- 
ment, and their schools have become known to history as the 
''Little Schools of Port Royal." The congregation was a reac- 
tion against the work and methods of the Jesuits. It included 
both elementary and secondary education, but never extended 
itself, and probably never had more than sLxty pupils and teach- 
ers. After seventeen years of work it was suppressed through 
the opposition of the Jesuits, and its members fled to the Neth- 
erlands. There they wrote those books which have explained 
to succeeding generations what they attempted, ^ and which have 
revealed what a modern type of educational experiment they 
conducted. The progressive and modern nature of their teaching, 
in an age of suspicion and intolerance, condemned them to 
extinction. Yet despite the progressive nature of their instruction, 
the intense religious atmosphere which they threw about all 
their work (R. 181) reveals the dominant characteristic of most 
education for church ends at the time. 

The Brothers of the Christian Schools. The largest and most 
influential of the teaching orders estabhshed for elementary edu- 
cation was the "Institute of the Brothers of the Christian 
Schools," founded by Father La Salle at Rouen, in 1684, and sanc- 
tioned by the King and Pope in 1724. As early as 1679 La Salle 
had begun a school at Rheims, and in 1684 he organized his disci- 
ples, prescribed a costume to be worn, and outlined the work of 
the brotherhood (R. 182). The object was to provide free ele- 

^ See especially Felix Cadet, Port-Royal Education (Scribners, New York, 1S98), 
for translations of many of the brief pedagogical writings of members of the Order. 



348 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

mentary and religious instruction in the vernacular for the chil- 
dren of the working classes, and to do for elementary education 
what the Jesuits had done for secondary education. La Salle's 
Conduct of Schools, first published in 1720, was the ratio studiorum 
of his order. His work marks the real beginning of free primary 
instruction in the vernacular in France. In addition to elemen- 
tary schools, a few of what we should call part-time continuation 
schools were organized for children engaged in commerce and 
industry. Realizing better than the Jesuits the need for well- 
trained rather than highly educated teachers for little children, 
and unable to supply members to meet the outside calls for 
schools. La Salle organized at Rheims, in 1685, what was prob- 
ably the second normal school for training teachers in the world. ^ 
Another was organized later at Paris. In addition to a good edu- 
cation of the type of the time and thorough grounding in religion, 
the student teachers learned to teach in practice schools, under 
the direction of experienced teachers. 

The pupils in La Salle's schools were graded into classes, and 
the class method of instruction was introduced. ^ The curriculum 
was unusually rich for a time when teaching methods and text- 
books were but poorly developed, the needs for literary education 
small, and when children could not as yet be spared from work 
longer than the age of nine or ten. Children learned first to read, 
write, and spell French, and to do simple composition work in the 
vernacular. Those who mastered this easily were taught the 
Latin Psalter in addition. Much prominence was given to writ- 
ing, the instruction being applied to the writing of bills, notes, 
receipts, and the like. Much free questioning was allowed in 
arithmetic and the Catechism, to insure perfect understanding of 
what was taught. Religious training was made the most promi- 
nent feature of the school, as was natural. A half-hour daily was 
given to the Catechism, mass was said daily, the crucifix was al- 
ways on the wall, and two or three pupils were always to be found 
kneeHng, telling their beads. The disciphne, in contradistinction 
to the customary practice of the time, was mild, though all pun- 

1 Father Demia, at Lyons, had organized what was probably the first training- 
school for masters, in 1672. La Salle's training-school dates from 1684. Francke'? 
German Seminarium PrcBceptcrum, at Halle, the first in German lands, dates from 
1696. 

^ The numerous pictures of schools and educational literature well into the nine- 
teenth century show the general prevalence of the individual method of instruction. 
It was the method in American schools until well toward the middle of the nine- 
teenth century. To have graded the children and introduced class instruction in 
1684 was an important advance which the world has been slow in learning. 



COUNTER-REFORMATION. OF CATHOLICS 349 




Fig. 104. A School of La Salle at Paris, i( 
A visit of James II and the Archbishop of Paris to the School 
(From a bas-relief on the statue of La Salle, at Rouen) 



ishments were carefully prescribed by rule.^ The rule of silence 
in the school was rigidly enjoined, all speech was to be in a low 
tone of voice, and a code of signals replaced speech for many 
things. 

Though the Order met with much opposition from both church 
and civil authorities, it made slow but steady headway. At the 
time of the death of La Salle, in 17 19, thirty-five years after its 
foundation, the Order had one general normal school, four normal 
schools for training teachers, three practice schools, thirty-three 
primary schools, and one continuation school. The Order re- 

^ Everything was according to rule, even the ferule, which must be made of two 
strips of leather, ten to twelve inches long, sewed together. All offenses, and the 
number and location of the blows for each, were specified. Later the corporal pun- 
ishment was replaced by penances. 



350 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



mained largely French, and at the time of its suppression, in 1792, 
had schools in 121 communities in France and 6 elsewhere, about 
1000 brothers, and approximately 30,000 children in its schools. 
This was approximately i child in every 175 of school age of the 
population of France at that time. While relatively small in 
numbers, their schools represented the best attempt to provide 




Fig. 105. The Brothers of the Christian Schools by 1792 
Map, showing the locations of their communities 

elementary education in any Catholic country before well into 
the nineteenth century. The distribution of their schools through- 
out France, by 1792, is shown on the map above. In 1803 the 
Order was reestablished, by 1838 it had schools in 282 commu- 
nities, and in 1887, when La Salle was declared a Saint of the 
Church, it had 1898 communities on four continents, 109 of which 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 351 

were in the United States, and was teaching a total of approxi- 
mately 300,000 primary children. 

5. General Results of the Reformation on Education 

Destruction and creation of schools. Any such general over- 
turning of the established institutions and traditions of a thou- 
sand years as occurred at the time of the Protestant Revolts, with 
the accompanying bitter hatreds and religious strife, could not 
help but result in extensive destruction of established institutions. 
Monasteries, churches, and schools alike suffered, and it required 
time to replace them. Even though they had been neglectful of 
their functions, inadequate in number, and unsuited to the needs 
of a world fast becoming modern, they had nevertheless answered 
partially the need of the times. In all the countries where revolts 
took place these institutions suffered more or less, but in England 
probably most of all. The old schools which were not destroyed 
were transformed into Protestant schools, the grammar schools 
to train scholars and leaders, and the parish schools into Protest- 
ant elementary schools to teach reading and the Catechism, but 
the number of the latter, in all Protestant lands, was very far 
short of the number needed to carry out the Protestant religious 
theory. This, as we have sesn, proposed to extend the elements 
of an education to large and entirely new classes of people who 
never before in the history of the world had had such advantages. 
Out of the Protestant religious conception that all should be edu- 
cated the popular elementary school of modern times has been 
evolved. The evolution, though, was slow, and long periods of 
time have been required for its accomplishment. 

In place of the schools destroyed, or the teachers driven out if 
no destruction took place, the reformers made an earnest effort 
to create new schools and supply teachers. This, though, re- 
quired time, especially as there was as yet in the world no body 
of vernacular teachers, no institutions in which such could be 
trained, no theory as to education except the religious, no supply 
of educated men or women from which to draw, no theory of 
state support and control, and no source of taxation from which to 
derive a steady flow of funds. Throughout the long Middle Ages 
the Church had supplied gratuitous or nearly gratuitous instruc- 
tion. This it could do, to the limited number whom it taught, 
from the proceeds of its age-old endowments and educational 
foundations. In the process of transformation from a Catholic 



352 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

to a Protestant State, and especially during the more than a cen- 
tury of turmoil and rehgious strife which followed the rupture of 
the old relations, many of the old endowments were lost or were 
diverted from their original purposes. As the Protestant reform- 
ers were supported generally by the ruling princes, many of these 
tried to remedy the deficiency by ordering schools estabhshed. 
The landed nobility though, unused to providing education for 
their villein tenants and serfs, ^ were averse to supplying the 
deficiency by any form of general taxation. Nor were the rising 
merchant classes in the cities any more anxious to pay taxes to 
provide for artisans and servants what had for ages been a gra- 
tuity or not furnished at all. 

No real demand for elementary schools. The creation of a 
largely new type of schools, and in sufficient numbers to meet the 
needs of large classes of people who before had never shared in 
the advantages of education, in consequence proved to be a work 
of centuries. The century of warfare which followed the refonna- 
tion movement more or less exhausted all Europe, while the 
Thirty Years' War which formed its culmination left the Gennan 
States, where the largest early educational progress had been 
made, a ruin. In consequence there was for long little money for 
school support, and religious interest and church tithes had to be 
depended on almost entirely for the establishment and support 
of schools. Out of the parish sextons or clerks a supply of vernac- 
ular teachers had to be evolved, a system of school organization 
and supervision worked out and added to the duties of the min- 
ister, and the feeling of need for education awakened sufficiently 
to make people wiUing to support schools. In consequence what 
Luther and Calvin declared at the beginning of the sixteenth 
century to be a necessity for the State and the common right of 
all, it took until well into the nineteenth century actually to 
create and make a reality. 

The great demand of the time, too, was not so much for the 
education of the masses, however desirable or even necessary this 
might be from the standpoint of Protestant religious theory, but 
for the training of leaders for the new religious and social order 
which the Revival of Learning, the rise of modern nationahties, 
and the Reformation movements had brought into being. For 
this secondary schools for boys, largely Latin in type, were de- 
manded rather than elementary vernacular schools for both sexes. 
1 See footnote i, page 207. 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 353 



We accordingly find the great creations of the period were second- 
ary schools. 

Lines of future development established. Still more, certain 
lines of future development now became clearly established. The 
drawing given here will help to make this evident. It will be 
seen from this that not only was the secondary school still the 
dominant type, though elementary schools began for the first 



Schools as developed in the 16th and 17th Centuries 








m 

I 






\^\\^'\ 



Fig. 106. Tendencies in Educational Development in Europe, 
1500 to 1700 

time to be considered as important also, but that the secondary 
schools were wholly independent of the elementary schools which 
now began to be created. The elementary schools were in the 
vernacular and for the masses ; the secondary schools were in the 
Latin tongue and for the training of the scholarly leaders. Be- 
tween these two schools, so different in type and in clientele, there 
was little in common. This difference was further emphasized 
with time. The elementary schools later on added subjects of 
use to the common people, while the secondary schools added 
subjects of use for scholarly preparation or for university entrance. 
The secondary schools also frequently provided preparatory 
schools for their particular classes of children. As a result, all 

rmrough Europe two school systems — an elementary-school sys- 
tem for the masses, and a secondary-school system for the classes 
— exist to-day side by side. We in America did not develop 
such a class school system, though we started that way. This 
was because the conception of education we finally developed 






354 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

was a product of a new democratic spirit, as will be explained 
later on. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Compare the attention to careful religious instruction in the secondary 
schools provided by the Lutherans, Calvinists, and English. What 
analogous instruction do we provide in the American high schools? Is it 
as thorough or as well done? 

2. Compare the scope and ideals of the educational system provided by the 
Calvinists with the same for the Lutherans and AngKcans. 

3. Compare the characteristics of Calvinistic (Huguenot) education, as 
summarized by Foster, with present-day state educational purposes. 

4. Just what kind of a school system did Knox propose (1560) for Scotland? 

5. Show how the educational program of the Jesuits reveals Ignatius Loyola 
as a man of vision. 

6. Viewed from the purposes the Order had in mind, was it warranted in 
neglecting the education of the masses? 

7. Does the success of the Order show the importance to society of finding 
and educating the future leader? Can all men be trained for leadership? 

8. What does the statement that the Jesuits were "too practical to make 
many changes," but had "a keen eye for what was best" in the work of 
others, indicate as to the nature of school administration and educa- 
tional progress? 

g. Indicate the advantages which the Jesuits had in their teachers and 
teaching-aim over us of to-day. How could we develop an aim as clearly 
defined and potent as theirs? Could we select teachers with such care? 
How? 

10. Compare the religious and educational propaganda of the Jesuits with 
the recent political propaganda of the Germans. 

11. What is meant by the statement that the Jesuit teaching method, like 
that of the modern German Volksschule, was a teaching and not a ques- 
tioning method? 

12. Compare present American standards for teacher-training for elemen- 
tary and secondary teaching with those required by the Jesuits: — {a) as 
to length of preparation; {b) as to nature and scope of preparation. 

13. How do you explain the introduction of sewing into the elementary ver- 
nacular Catholic schools for girls, so long before handiwork for boys 
was thought of? 

14. In schools so formallj^ organized as those of La Salle, how do you explain 
the great freedom allowed in questioning on arithmetic and the Cate- 
chism? 

15. Why should La Salle's work have been so opposed by both Church and 
civil authorities? Do you consider that his Order ever made what would 
be called rapid progress? 

16. Why must the education of leaders always precede the education of the 
masses? 

17. Explain how European countries came naturally to have two largely 
independent school systems — a secondary school for leaders and an 
elementary school for the masses — whereas we have only one con- 
tinuous system. 

18. Explain why modern state systems of education developed first in the 
German States, and why England and the Catholic nations of Europe 
were so long in dfveloping state school systems. 



COUNTER-REFORMATION OF CATHOLICS 355 



SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced : 

175. Woodward: Course of Study at the College of Geneva. 

176. Synod of Dort: Scheme of Christian Education adopted. 

177. Kilpatrick: Work of the Dutch in developing Schools. 

178. Kilpatrick: Character of the Dutch Schools of 1650. -• 

179. Statutes: The Scotch School Law of 1646. 

180. Pachtler: The Ratio Studiorum of the Jesuits. 

181. Gerard: The Dominant Religious Purpose in the Education of French 
Girls. 

182. La Salle: Rules for the "Brothers of the Christian Schools." 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Was the College at Geneva (175) a true humanistic-revival school? 

2. Just what did the Synod of Dort provide for (176) in the matter of 
schools, school supervision, and ministerial duties? 

3. Compare the work of the Dutch (177) and the Lutherans (159-163) in 
creating schools. 

4. Just what type of school is indicated by selection 178? 

5. Just what did the Scotch law of 1646 provide for (179)? 

6. Characterize the schools provided for by La Salle (182). 

7. Compare the religious care at Port Royal (181) with that suggested by 
Saint Jerome (R. 45). 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Baird, C. W. History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France. 

Baird, C. W. Huguenot Emigration to America. 

Grant, Jas. History of the Burgh Schools of Scotland. 

Hughes, Thos. Loyola, and the Educational System of the Jesuits. 

Kilpatrick, Wm. H. The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial 

New York. 
Laurie, S. S. Historv of Educational Opinion since the Renaissance. 
Ravelet, A. Blessed J. B. de la Salle. 
Schwickerath, R. Jesuit Education; its History and Principles in the Light 

of Modern Educational Problems. 
Woodward, W. H. Education during the Renaissance. 



CHAPTER XV 

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT 
REVOLTS 

III. THE REFORMATION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION 

The Protestant settlement of America. Columbus had dis- 
covered the new world just twenty-five years before Luther 
nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, and by the 
time the northern continent had been roughly explored and was 
ready for settlement, Europe was in the midst of a century of 
warfare in a vain attempt to extirpate the Protestant heresy. By 
the time that the futility of fire and sword as means for religious 
conversion had finally dawned upon Christian Europe and found 
expression in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed the 
terrible Thirty Years' War (p. 301), the first permanent settle- 
ments in a number of the American colonies had been made. 
These settlements, and the beginnings of education in America, 
are so closely tied up with the Protestant Revolts in Europe that 
a chapter on the beginnings of American education belongs here 
as still another phase of the educational results of the Protestant 
Revolts. 

Practically all the early settlers in America came from among 
the peoples and from those lands which had embraced some form 
of the Protestant faith, and many of them came to America to 
found new homes and estabhsh their churches in the wilderness, 
because here they could enjoy a rehgious freedom impossible in 
their old home-lands. This was especially true of the French 
Huguenots, many of whom, after the revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes ^ (1685), fled to America and settled along the coast of 
the Carolinas; the Calvinistic Dutch and Walloons, who settled 
in and about New Amsterdam; the Scotch and Scotch-Irish 

^ Representing not over one tenth of the population, the Protestants in France 
had from the first been subjected to much persecution. In the Massacre of Saint 
Bartholomew (1572) over one thousand had been massacred in Paris and ten thou- 
sand more in the provinces. After some warfare, a treaty was made, in 1598, under 
which the so-called "Edict of Nantes" guaranteed religious toleration for the Prot- 
estants. In 1685 this was revoked, and their ministers were given fifteen days to 
leave France. The members were, however, forbidden to leave. Many, though 
got away, escaping to the Low Countries, England, and to America. 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 357 

Presbyterians, who settled in New Jersey, and later extended 
along the Allegheny Mountain ridges into all the southern colo- 
nies; the English Quakers about Philadelphia, who came under 
the leadership of William Penn, and a few EngUsh Baptists and 
Methodists in eastern Pennsylvania; the Swedish Lutherans, 
along the Delaware; the German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennon- 
ites, Dunkers, and Reformed -Church Germans, who settled in 
large numbers in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania: and the 
Calvinistic dissenters from the Enghsh National Church, known 
as Puritans, who settled the New England colonies, and who, 
more than any others, gave direction to the future development 
of education in the American States. Very many of these early 
religious groups came to America in little congregations, bring- 
ing their ministers with them. Each set up, in the colony in 
which it settled, what were virtually little religious republics, 
that through them they might the better perpetuate the religious 
principles for which they had left the land of their birth. Educa- 
tion of the young for membership in the Church, and the perpet- 
uation of a learned ministry for the congregations, from the first 
elicited the serious attention of these pioneer settlers. 

Englishmen who were adherents of the English national faith 
(Anghcans) also settled in Virginia and the other southern colo- 
nies, and later in New York and New Jersey, while Maryland was 
founded as the only Catholic colony, in what is now the United 
States, by a group of persecuted English Catholics who obtained 
a charter from Charles I, in 1632. These settlements are shown 
on the map on the following page. As a result of these settle- 
ments there was laid, during the early colonial period of American 
history, the foundation of those type attitudes toward education 
which subsequently so materially shaped the educational develop- 
ment of the different American States during the early part of our 
national history. 

The Puritans in New England. Of all those who came to 
America during this early period, the Cahdnistic Puritans who 
settled the New England colonies contributed most that was val- 
uable to the future educational development of America, and 
because of this will be considered first. 

The original reformation in England, as was stated in chapters 
XII and XIII, had been much more nominal than real. The Eng- 
lish Bible and the Enghsh Prayer-Book had been issued to the 
churches (R. 170), and the King instead of the Pope had been 



358 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



declared by the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) to be the head of the 
EngHsh National Church. The same priests, though, had con- 
tinued in the churches under the new regime, and the church serv- 
ice had not greatly changed aside from its transformation from 




Fig. 107. Map showing the Religious Settlements in America 

Latin into English. Neither the Church as an organization nor 
its members experienced any great religious reformation. Not all 
Englishmen, though, took the change in allegiance so lightly 
(R. 183), and in consequence there came to be a gradually in- 
creasing number who desired a more fundamental reform of the 
English Church. By 1600 the demand for Church reform had 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 



359 




» '-^ 'i 



become very insistent, and the question of Church purification 
(whence the name "Puritans") had become a burning question 
in England. 

The English Puritans, moreover, were of two classes. One was 
a moderate but influential "low-church " group within the " high " 
State Church, possessed of no desire to separate Church and 
State, but earnestly insistent on a simplification of the Church 
ceremonial, the elimination of a number of the vestiges of the old 
Romish-Church ritual, and particularly the introduction of more 
preaching into the service. The other class constituted a much 
more radical group, and had become deeply imbued with Calvin- 
istic thinking. This group gradually came into open opposi- 
tion to any State Church, 
stood for the local inde- 
pendence of the different 
churches or congrega- 
tions, and desired the 
complete elimination of 
all vestiges of the Romish 
faith from the church 
services.^ They became 
known as Independents, 
or Separatists, and formed 
the germs of the later 
Congregational groups of 
early New England. Both 
Elizabeth (i 558-1 603) and 
James I (1603-25) savagely persecuted this more radical group, 
and many of their congregations were forced to flee from Eng- 
land to obtain personal safety and to enjoy religious liberty (R. 
184). One of these fugitive congregations, from Scrooby, in north- 
central England, after living for several years at Leyden, in 
Holland, finally set sail for America, landed on Plymouth Rock, 
in 1620, and began the settlement of that "bleak and stormy 
coast." Other congregations soon followed, it having been 
estimated that twenty thousand English Puritans migrated - to 






t-x--^ 



Fig. 108. Homes of the Pilgrims, and 
THEIR Route to America 



* The culmination of this dissatisfaction came in 1649, when Charles I was be- 
headed and "The Commonwealth" was established under Cromwell. During the 
troubled times which followed (1649-60) much damage was done to the churches of 
England by way of eliminating vestiges of "popery." 

^ Some of these went back to England — many after the establishment of the 
Vrotestant Commonwealth under Cromwell (1645). It has been estimated, for 



36o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the New England wilderness before 1640. These represented a 
fairly well-to-do type of middle-class Englishmen, practically all 
of whom had had good educational advantages at home. 

Settling along the coast in httle groups or congregations, they 
at once set up a combined civil and religious form of government, 
modeled in a way after Calvin's City-State at Geneva, and which 
became known as a New England town.^ In time the southern 
portion of the coast of New England was dotted with httle self- 
governing settlements of those who had come to America to 
obtain for themselves that rehgious freedom which had been 
denied them at home. These settlements were loosely bound 
together in a colony federation, in which each town was repre- 
sented in a General Court, or legislature. The extent of these 
settlements by 1660 is shown on the map on the opposite page. 

Beginnings of schools in New England. Having come to 
America to secure religious freedom, it was but natural that the 
perpetuation of their particular faith by means of education 
should have been one of the first matters to engage their attention, 
after the building of their homes and the setting up of the civil 
goverimient (R. 185). Being deeply imbued with Calvinistic 
ideas as to government and religion, they desired to found here a 
religious commonwealth, somewhat after the model of Geneva 
(p. 298), or Scotland (p. 335), or the Dutch provinces (p. 334), 
the corner-stones of which should be religion and education. 

At first, English precedents were followed. Home instruction, 
which was quite common in England among the Puritans, was 
naturally much employed to teach the children to read the Bible 
and to train them to participate in both the family and the con- 
gregational worship. After 1647, town elementary schools under 
a master, and later the English "dame schools" (chapter xviii), 
were established to provide this rudimentary instruction. The 
English apprentice system was also established (R. 201), and the 
masters of apprentices gave similar instruction to boys entrusted 

three of the early colonies, that the population by decades was approximately as 
follows: 

i6jo 1640 1650 1660 

New Netherlands 5°° 1000 3000 6000 

Massachusetts 13°° 14000 18000 25000 

Virginia 3000 8000 17000 33000 

1 The name and the form came alike from old England, where an irregular area 
known as a "town" or a "township," constituted the unit of representation in the 
shiremoats and the membership of the church parish. Almost every town and par- 
ish officer known in England was created by the new towns in New England, with 
practically the same functions as in the old home. 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 



361 



to their care. The town religious governments, under which all 
the little congregations organized themselves, much as the little 
religious parishes had been organized in old England, also began 
the voluntary establishment of town grammar schools, as a few 
towns in England had done (R. 143) before the Puritans migrated. 
The "Latin School" at Boston dates from 1635, and has had a 
continuous existence since that time. The grammar school at 




Fig. 109. New England Settlements, 1660 



362 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Charlestown dates from 1636, that at Ipswich from the same year, 
and the school at Salem from 1637. In 1639 Dorchester voted: 

that there shall be a rent of 20 lb a year for ever imposed vpon 
Tomsons Island . . . toward the mayntenance of a schoole in Dorches- 
ter. This rent of 20 lb yearly to bee payd to such a schoole-mastej; as 
shall vndertake to teach english, latine, and other tongues, and also 
writing. The said schoole-master to bee chosen from tyme to tyme 
pr the freemen. 

Newbury, in 1639, voted "foure akers of upland" and "sixe akers 
of salt marsh" to Anthony Somerby "for his encouragement to 

keepe schoole for one yeare," 
and later levied a town rate of 
£24 for a "schoole to be kepte 
at the meeting house." Cam- 
bridge also early estabHshed a 
Latin grammar school "for the 
training up of Young Schollars, 
and fitting them ^ for Academi- 
call Learning'' (R. 185). 

The support for the town 
schools thus founded was de- 
rived from various sources, such 
as the levying of tuition fees, 
the income from town lands or 




Fig. no. The Boston Latin 
Grammar School 

The original school, on School Street, 
with King's Chapel on the left 



fisheries set aside for the purpose,- voluntary contributions from 
the people of the town.^ a town tax, or a combination of two or 
more of these methods. The founding of the "free (grammar) 
school" at Roxburie, in 1645, is representative (R. 188) of the 
early methods. There was no uniform plan as yet, in either old 
or New England. 

1 "The settlers were in the first freshness of their Utopian enthusiasm, and their 
church establishment was the very heart of their enterprise. It became therefore 
a matter of primary importance to educate preachers. For ages preparation for 
the ministry had consisted mainly in acquiring a knowledge of Latin, the sacred 
tongue of western Christendom. Though the Latin service was no longer used by 
Protestants, and the Vulgate Bible had been dethroned by the original text, and 
though the main stream of English theology was by this time flowing in the channel 
of the mother tongue, the notion that all ministers should know Latin had still some 
centuries of tough life in it." (Eggleston, E., The Transit of Civilization, p. 225.) 

- For example, the town of Boston, in 1641, devoted the income from Deere 
Island to the support of schools, and V\\ nn .;'-, in 1670, appropriated the income 
from the Cape Cod fishing industry to the support of grammar schools (R. 194 c). 

These are among the earliest of the perm.inent endowments for education in 
America. 

* See The Development of School Supp' i in Colonial Massachusetts, by George L. 
Jackson, for a careful study of the diff ■ .nl -arly methods of school support. 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 363 

Founding of Harvard College. In addition to establishing Latin 
f^rammar schools, a college was founded, in 1636, by the General 
Court (legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to perpetu- 
ate learning and insure an educated ministry (R. 185) to the 
churches after "our present ministers shall lie in the dust." This 
new college, located at Newtowne, was modeled after Emmanuel 
College at Cambridge, an English Puritan college in which many 
of the early New England colonists had studied/ and in loving 
memory of which they rechristened Newtowne as Cambridge. 
In 1639 the college was christened Harvard College, after a grad- 
uate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by the name of John 
Harvard, who died in Charlestown, a year after his arrival in the 
colony, and who left the college his library of two hundred and 
sixty volumes and half his property, about £850. 

The instruction in the new college was a combination of the arts 
and theological instruction given in a mediaeval university, 
though at Harv^ard the President, Master Dunster (R. 185), did 
all the teaching. For the first fifty years at Harvard this con- 
tinued to be true, the attendance during that time seldom exceed- 
ing twenty. The entrance requirements for the college (R. 186 a) 
call for the completion of a typical English Latin grammar-school 
education; the rules and precepts for the government of the col- 
lege (R. 18 5 b) reveal the deep religious motive; and the schedule 
of studies (R. 186 c) and the requirements for degrees (R. 186 d) 
both show that the instruction was true to the European t}^e. 
In the charter for the college, granted by the colonial legislature in 
1650 (R. 187 a), we find exemptions and conditions which remind 
one strongly of the older European foundations. A century later 
Brown College, in Rhode Island, was granted even more exten- 
sive exemptions (R. 187 b). 

The first colonial legislation: the Law of 1642. We thus see 
manifested early in New England the deep Puritan- Calvinistic 
zeal for learning as a bulwark of Church and State. We also see 
the establishment in the wilderness of New England of a typical 
English educational system — that is, private instruction in read- 
ing and religion by the parents in the home and by the masters of 
apprentices, and later by a town schoolmaster; the Latin grammar 

1 The Puritan emigrants to New England represented a sturdy and well-educated 
class of English country squires and yeomen. They came of thrifty and well-to-do 
stock, the shiftless and incompetent not being represented. All had had good edu- 
cational advantages, and many were graduates of Cambridge University. It has 
been asserted that probably never since has the proportion of college men in the 
community been so large. 



364 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

school in the larger towns, to prepare boys for the college of the 
colony; and an EngHsh-type college to prepare them for the min- 
istry. As in England, too, all was clearly subordinate to the 
Church. Still further, as in England also, the system was volun- 
tary, the deep religious interest which had brought the congrega- 
tions to America being depended upon to insure for all the neces- 
sary education and religious training. 

It early became evident, though, that these voluntary efforts 
on the part of the people and the towns would not be sufficient to 
insure that general education which was required by the Puritan 
religious theory. Under the hard pioneer conditions, and the suf- 
fering which ensued, many parents and masters of apprentices 
evidently proved neglectful of their educational duties. Accord- 
ingly the Church appealed to its servant, the State, as represented 
in the colonial legislature (General Court) to assist it in compelling 
parents and masters to observe their religious obligations. The 
result was the famous Massachusetts Law of 1642 (R. 190), which 
directed "the chosen men" (Selectmen; Councilmen) of each 
town to ascertain, from time to time, if the parents and masters 
were attending to their educational duties; if the children were 
being trained "in learning and labor and other employments . . . 
profitable to the Commonwealth"; and if children were being 
taught " to read and understand the principles of rehgion and the 
capital laws of the country," and empowered them to impose fines 
on "those who refuse to render such accounts to them when re- 
quired." In 1645 the General Court further ordered that all 
youth between ten and sixteen years of age should also receive 
instruction "in ye exercise of arms, as small guns, halfe pikes, 
bowes & arrows, &c." 

The Law of 1642 is remarkable in that, for the first time in the 
English-speaking world, a legislative body representing the State 
ordered that all children should be taught to read. The law shows 
clearly not only the influence of the Reformation theory as to 
personal salvation and the Calvinistic conception of the connec- 
tion between learning and religion, but also the influence of the 
English Poor-Law legislation which had developed rapidly during 
the- half -century immediately preceding the coming of the Puri 
tans to America (R. 173). On the foundations of the EngHsh 
Poor Law of 1601 (R. 174) our New England settlers moulded 
the first American law relating to education, adding to the 
principles there established (p. 326) a distinct Calvinistic contri- 




After God h\d carried 1£_s.\fe to'Nev/ .England 

and '/ee had b\ ilded ovr hovses 

pro\ ided necessaries for ovr ll\ eli hood 

reard c0n\en1ent places for gods worship 

-\nd 5etled thecimll govern\lent 

one of the next things we longed for 

AND LOOKED AFTER V/\s TO ADNANCE LEARNING 

AND PERPETX ATE IT TO POSTERITY' 

DREADING TO LEAVE AN ILLITERATE M1N1STER> 

TO THE CHVRCHES WHEN 0\ R PRESENTMl-NL^TERS 

SHALL LIE IN THE DVST. 



\'F'v' FXGLANDS F1R?T FKVITS 



-tf.?-SS!^tt, 



B-heGENEPALC0VPT-^1ASSACHVSETTSB^ 

23 october 163'': agfced to give 400 ^ 
to-//apd<=-a schoale cr c'glledge v/hearof 200f 

TO BEE PAID THE ;-E:-;T VEAP5 &< 200 / 
//HE^^THEV/OPKEIS FI/'ISHED L THE NEXT COVRT 
■ " jr. i.pPOr.T ■//HEAPE k Wt BVILDING 
15 ■•^■^■■BFFl':"/ THE COLLED G IS ORDERED 
TO BEE AT VE"/fETO'/n'E 
2viy\Yi':38 IT IS OPDEPED THAT ::EWET0V/NE , 
SHALL HE; rEPOPV/APD BE CALLED CAMBRlGE 
13 M \RCH I'wjo- -; IT IS ORDERED THAT THE COLLEDGEs 
\GPEED \ PC. FOP.^iEPLV TO BEE BVILT AT CAMBPfDi 
SHALBEE TALLED HAP\'ARn COLLEDGF 



Plate g. Two Tablets on the West Gateway at Harvard University 
Reproducing colonial records relating to the founding of Harvard College 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 365 

bution to our new-world life that, the authorities of the civil 
town should see that all children were taught " to read and under- 
stand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the coun- 
try." This law the Selectmen, or the courts if they failed to do so, 
were ordered to enforce, and the courts usually looked after their 
duties in the matter (R. 192). 

The Law of 1647. The Law of 1642, while ordering " the chosen 
men" of each town to see that the education and training of chil- 
dren was not neglected, and providing for fines on parents and 
masters who failed to render accounts when required, did not, 
however, establish schools, or direct the employment of school- 
masters. The provision of education, after the English fashion, 
was still left with the homes. After a trial of five years, the results 
of which were not satisfactory, the General Court enacted another 
law by means of which it has been asserted that "the Puritan 
government of Massachusetts rendered probably its greatest serv- 
ice to the future." 

After recounting in a preamble (R. 191) that it had in the past 
been " one cheife proiect of y^ ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men 
from the knowledge of y^ Scriptures, ... by keeping y" in an un- 
knowne tongue," so now "by pswading from y*" use of tongues," 
and " obscuring y^ true sence & meaning of y^ originall " by "false 
glosses of saint-seeming deceivers," learning was in danger of 
being "buried in y^ grave of o"" fath'^ in y*" church and comon- 
wealth"; the Court ordered: 

1. That every town having fifty householders should at once appoint 
a teacher of reading and writing, and provide for his wages in such 
manner as the town might determine; and 

2. That every town having one hundred householders must provide 
a grammar school to fit youths for the university, under a pen- 
alty of £5 (afterwards increased to £20) for failure to do so. 

This law represents a distinct step in advance over the Law of 
1642, and for this there are no English precedents. It was not 
until the latter part of the nineteenth century that England took 
such a step. The precedents for the compulsory establishment of 
schools lie rather in the practices of the different German States 
(p. 318), the actions of the Dutch synods (R. 176) and provinces 
(p. 335), the Acts of the Scottish parhament of 1633 and 1646 
(p. 334; R. 179), and the general Calvinistic principle that educa- 
tion was an important function of a religious State. 

Principles established. The State here, acting again as the 



366 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

servant of the Church, enacted a law and fixed a tradition which 
prevailed and grew in strength and effectiveness after State and 
Church had parted company. Not only was a school system 
ordered established — elementary for all towns and children, and 
secondary for youths in the larger towns — but, for the first time 
among English-speaking people, there was an assertion of the right 
of the State to require communities to establish and maintain 
schools, under penalty if they refused to do so. It can be safely 
asserted, in the light of later developments, that the two laws of 
1642 and 1647 represent the foundations upon which our American 
state pubHc-school systems have been built. Mr. Martin, the 
historian of the Massachusetts pubHc-school system, states the 
fundamental principles which underlay this legislation, as follows: ^ 

1. The universal education of youth is essential to the well-being of 
the State. 

2. The obligation to furnish this education rests primarily upon the 
parent. 

3. The State has a right to enforce this obligation. 

4. The State may fix a standard which shall determine the kind of 
education, and the minimum amount. 

5. Public money, raised by general tax, may be used to provide such 
education as the State requires. The tax may be general, though 
the school attendance is not. 

6. Education higher than the rudiments may be supplied by the 
State. Opportunity must be provided, at public expense, for 
youths who wish to be fitted for the university. 

*'It is important to note here," adds Mr. Martin, ''that the 
idea underlying all this legislation is neither paternalistic nor so- 
cialistic. The child is to be educated, not to advance his personal 
interests, but because the State will suffer if he is not educated. 
The State does not provide schools to relieve the parent, nor be- 
cause it can educate better than the parent can, but because it can 
thereby better enforce the obligation which it imposes." To pre- 
vent a return to the former state of religious ignorance it was im- 
portant that education be provided. To assure this the colonial 
legislature enacted a law requiring the maintenance and support 
of schools by the towns. This law became the corner-stone of our 
American state school systems. 

Influence on other New England colonies. Connecticut Col- 
ony, in its Law of 1650 establishing a school system, combined the 

1 Martin, Geo. H., The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public-School System, pp. 
14-16. 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 



367 



spirit of the Massachusetts Law of 1642, though stated in differ- 
ent words (R. 193), and the Law of 1647, stated word for word. 
New Haven Colony, in 1655, ordered that children and appren- 
tices should be taught to read, as had been done in Massachusetts, 
in 1642, but on the union of New Haven and Connecticut Colo- 
nies, in 1665, the Con- 
necticut Code became 
the law for the united 
colonies. In 1702 a 
college was founded 
(Yale) and finally lo- 
cated at New Haven, 
to offer preparation 
for the ministry in the 
Connecticut colony, 
as had been done ear- 
lier in Massachusetts, 
and Latin grammar 
schools were founded 
the Connecticut 




m 



Fig. III. Where Yale College was founded 

The home of the Reverend Samuel Russell, at Bran- 
ford, Conn. The first meeting to organize the college 
was held there, in September, 1701 

towns to prepare for 

the new college, as also had been done earHer in Massachusetts. 
The rules and regulations for the grammar school at New Haven 
(R. 189) reveal the purpose and describe the instruction provided 
in one of the earliest and best of these. 

Plymouth Colony, in 1658 and again in 1663, proposed to the 
towns that they "sett vp" a schoolmaster "to traine vp children 
to reading and writing" (R. 194 a). In 1672 the towns were 
asked to aid Harvard College by gifts (R. 194 b). In 1673-74 the 
income from the Cape Cod fisheries was set aside for the support 
of a (grammar) school (R. 194 c). Finally, in 1677, all towns 
having over fifty families and maintaining a grammar school were 
ordered aided from the fishery proceeds (R. 194 d). 

The Massachusetts laws also applied to Maine, New Hamp- 
shire, and Vermont, as these were then a part of Massachusetts 
Colony. After New Hampshire separated, in 1680, the Massa- 
chusetts Law of 1647 was virtually readopted in 1719-21. 
In Maine and Vermont there were so few settlers, until near the 
beginning of our national life, that the influence of the Massa- 
chusetts legislation on these States was negligible until a later 
period. 



368 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Only in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, of all the 
New England colonies, did the Massachusetts legislation fail to 
exert a deep influence. Settled as these two had been by refugees 
from New England, and organized on a basis of hospitality to all 
who suffered from religious oppression elsewhere, the religious 
stimulus to the founding of schools naturally was lacking. As 
the religious basis for education was as yet the only basis, the 
first development of schools in Rhode Island awaited the humani- 
tarian and economic influences which did not become operative 
until early in the nineteenth century. 

Outside of the New England colonies, the appeal to the State 
as the servant of the Church was seldom made during the early 
colonial period, the churches handling the educational problem 
in their own way. As a result the beginnings of State oversight 
and control were left to New England. In the central colonies a 
series of parochial-school systems came to prevail, while in Episco- 
palian Virginia and the other colonies to the south the no-business- 
of-the-State attitude assumed toward education by the mother 
country was copied. 

The church schools of New York. New Netherland, as New 
York Colony was called before the English occupation, was settled 
by the Dutch West India Company, and some dozen villages about 
New York and up the Hudson had been founded by the time it 
passed to the control of the English, in 1664. In these the Dutch 
established typical home-land public parochial schools, under the 
control of the Reformed Dutch Church. Thb schoolmaster was 
usually the reader and precentor in the church as well (R. 195), 
and often acted, as in Holland, as sexton besides. Girls attended 
on equal terms with boys, but sat apart and recited in separate 
classes. The instruction consisted of reading and writing Dutch, 
sometimes a little arithmetic, the Dutch Catechism, the reading 
of a few religious books, and certain prayers. The rules (1661) 
for a schoolmaster in New Amsterdam (R. 196), and the contract 
with a Dutch schoolmaster in Flatbush (R. 195), dating from 
1682, reveal the type of schools and school conditions provided. 
All except the children of the poor paid fees to the schoolmaster.^ 

1 The charging of a tuition fee to those who could afford to pay was a common 
European practice of the time, nevertheless the public authorities — at that time a 
mixture of civil and church officials — provided the school, employed and licensed 
the teacher, determined the textbooks to be used, and laid down the conditions 
under which the school should be conducted. The schoolmaster assisted the church 
by participating in the Sunday services. The elementary school of the Dutch, 
which was copied in the New Netherland, was thus a combination of a public and 
parochiaL and a free and pay school. 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 369 

He was licensed by the Dutch church authorities. As the Dutch 
had not come to America because of persecution, and were in no 
way out of sympathy with rehgious conditions in the home-land, 
the schools they developed here were typical of the Dutch Euro- 
pean parochial schools of the time (R. 178). A trivial (Latin) 
school was also established in New York, in 1652. 

After the English occupation the English principle of private 
and church control of education, with schooling on a tuition or a 
charitable basis, came to prevail, and this continued up to the 
beginning of our national period. ^ Of the English colonial schools 
of New York Draper has written: - 

All the English schools in the province from 1 700 down to the time 
of the Declaration of Independence were maintained by a great religious 
society organized under the auspices of the Church of England — and, 
of course, with the favor of the government — called "The Society 
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The law govern- 
ing this Society provided that no teacher should be employed until he 
had proved "his affection for the present government" and his "con- 
formity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England." 
Schools maintained under such auspices were in no sense free schools. 
Indeed, humiliating as it is, no student of history can fail to discern 
the fact that the government of Great Britain, during its supremacy in 
this territory, did nothing to facilitate the extension or promote the 
efficiency of free elementary schools among the people. 

The parochial schools of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was 
settled by Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, German 
Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, and members of the German 
Reformed Church, all of whom came to America to secure greater 
religious Uberty and had been attracted to this colony by the free- 
dom of religious worship which Penn had provided for there. All 
these were Protestant sects, all believed in the necessity of learn- 
ing to read the Bible as a means to personal salvation, and all 
made efforts looking toward the estabhshment of schools as a part 
of their church organization. Unlike New England, though, no 
sect was in a majority; church control for each denomination was 
considered as most satisfactory; and no appeal was made to the 
State to have it assist the churches in the enforcement of their 
rehgious purposes. The clergymen were usually the teachers in 
the parochial schools established,^ while private pay schools were 

1 This was, of course, much more true of New York City and Island than of the 
outlying Dutch villages. In these latter a pubHc school was for long maintained. 

^ Draper, A. S., Origin and Development of the New York Common School System. 

* Among the German Lutherans, who constituted nearly one fourth of the total 
population of the colony, a school is claimed to have been established alongside the 



370 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 112. An Old Quaker Meeting- 
house AND School at Lampeter, 
Pennsylvania 

(From an old drawing) 



opened in the villages and towns. These were taught in English, 
German, or in the MoraWan tongue, according to the original 
language of the different immigrants. The Quakers seem to 
have taken particular interest in schools (R. 199), a Quaker school 

in Philadelphia (R. 198) hav- 
ing been estabhshed the year 
the city was founded. Girls 
were educated as well as boys, 
and the emphasis was placed 
on reading, writing, counting, 
and religion, rather than upon 
any higher form of training. 
The result was the devel- 
opment in this colony of a 
policy of depending on church 
and private effort, and the 
provision of education, aside 
from certain rudimentary and 
religious instruction, was left 
largely for those who could afford to pay for the privilege. 
Charitable education was extended to but a few, for a short 
time, while, under the freedom allowed, many communities made 
but indifferent provisions or suffered their schools to lapse. 
Under the primitive conditions of the time the interest even 
in religious education often declined almost to the vanishing 
point. So lax in the matter of providing schooling had many 
communities become that the second Provincial Assembly, sitting 
in Philadelphia, in 1683, passed an ordinance requiring (R. 197) 
that all persons having children must cause them to be taught to 
read and write, so that they might be able to read the Scriptures 
by the time they were twelve years old, and also that all children 
be taught some useful trade. A fine of £5 was to be assessed for 
failure to comply with the law. So much in advance of EngHsh 
ideas as to what was fitting and proper was this compulsory law 
that it was vetoed by William and Mary, when submitted to their 

church by each of the congregations "at the earliest possible period after its forma- 
tion." The close connection between these Lutheran congregations and their schools 
may be seen from the foUov/ing contract, dated at Lancaster, in 1774: 

"I, the undersigned, John Hoffman, parochial teacher of the church at Lancaster, 
have promised in the presence of the congregation, to serve as choirister, and, as 
long as we have no pastor, to read sermons on Sunday. In summer I promise to 
hold cathechetical instruction with the young, as becomes a faithful teacher, and 
also to lead them in the singing and attend to the clock." 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 371 

majesties for approval. Ten years later it was reenacted by the 
Governor and Assembly of the colony, but proved so difficult of 
enforcement that it was soon dropped, and the chance of starting 
education in Pennsylvania somewhat after the New England 
model was lost. The colony now settled down to a policy of non 
state action, and this in time became so firmly established that 
the do-as-you-please idea persisted in this State up to the estab- 
lishment of the first free state school system, in 1834. 

Mixed conditions in New Jersey. In New Jersey, situated as 
it was near the center of the different colonies, the early develop- 
ment of education there was the product of a number of different 
influences. The Dutch crossed from New Amsterdam, the Eng- 
lish came from Connecticut and later from New York, Scotch and 
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians came from the mother country, Swed- 
ish Lutherans settled along the Delaware, and Quakers and Ger- 
man Lutherans came over from Pennsylvania. The educational 
practice of the colony or land from which each group of settlers 
came was reproduced in the colony. After the EngHsh succeeded 
the Dutch in New Amsterdam (1664), English methods and prac- 
tice in education gradually came into control throughout most of 
New Jersey, and as a result here, as in New York, but little was 
accomplished in providing schools for other than a select few until 
well after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Neither New 
Jersey, New York, nor Pennsylvania may be said to have devel- 
oped any colonial educational policy aside from that of allowing 
private and parochial effort to provide such schools as seemed 
desirable. 

Virginia and the southern type. Almost all the conditions 
attending the settlement of Virginia were in contrast to those of 
the New England colonies. The early settlers were from the same 
class of Enghsh yeomen and country squires, but with the impor- 
tant difference that whereas the New England settlers were Dis- 
senters from the Church of England and had come to America to 
obtain freedom in rehgious worship, the settlers in Virginia were 
adherents of the National Church and had come to America for 
gain. The marked differences in climate and possible crops led 
to the large plantation type of settlement, instead of the compact 
little New England town; the introduction of large numbers of 
"indentured white servants," and later |^egro slaves, led to the 
development of classes in society instead of to the New England 
type of democracy; and the lack of a strong religious motive foi 



372 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

education naturally led to the adoption of the customary English 
practices instead of to the development of colonial schools. The 
tutor in the home, education in small private pay schools, or edu- 
cation in the mother country were the prevaihng methods adopted 
among the well-to-do planters, while the poorer classes were left 
with only such advantages as apprenticeship training or charity 
schools might provide. Throughout the entire colonial period 
Virginia remained most hke the mother country in spirit and 
practice, and stands among the colonies as the clearest example 
of the Enghsh attitude toward school support and control. As 
in the mother country, education was considered to be no business 
of the State. Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, 
and the Carolinas followed the English attitude, much after the 
fashion of Virginia. 

Practically all the Virginia colonial legislation relating to edu- 
cation refers either to William and Mary College (founded in 
1693), or to the education of orphans and the children of the poor. 
Both these interests, as we have previously seen, were typically 
English. All the seventeenth-century legislation relating to 
education is based on the Enghsh Poor-Law legislation,^ previ- 
ously described (p. 325), and included the compulsory appren- 
ticeship of the children of the poor, training in a trade, the require- 
ment that the public authorities must provide opportunities for 
this type of education, and the use of both local and colony funds 
for the purpose (R. 200 a), all, as the Statutes state, "according 
to the aforesaid laudable custom in the Kingdom of England." 
It was not until 1705 that Virginia reached the point, reached by 
Massachusetts in 1642, of requiring that "the master of the [ap- 
prenticed] orphan shall be obliged to teach him to read and write." 
In all the Anghcan colonies the apprenticing of the children of the 
poor (see R. 200 b for some interesting North Carolina records) 
was a characteristic feature. During the entire colonial period 
the indifference of the mother country to general education was 
steadily reflected in Virginia and in the colonies which were essen- 
tially Anglican in religion, and followed the English example. 

^ The seventeenth-century Virginia legislation relating to education is as follows: 
1643. Orphans to be educated "according to the competence of their estate." 
1646. "If the estate be so meane and inconsiderate that it will not reach to a free 

education, then that orphan [shall] be bound to some manuall trade . . . 

except some friends or relatives be willing to keep them." 
1660-61. "To avoid sloth and idleness ... as also for the relief of parents whose 

poverty extends not to giving [their children] breeding, the justices of the 

peace should . . . bind out children to tradesmen or husbandmen to be 

brought up in some good and lawful calling." 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 373 

Type plans represented by 1750. The seventeenth century 
thus witnessed the transplanting of European ideas as to govern- 
ment, religion, and education to the new American colonies, and 
by the eighteenth century we find three clearly marked types of 
educational practice or conception as to educational responsibility 
established on American soil. 

The first was the strong Calvinistic conception of a religious 
State, supporting a system of common vernacular schools, higher 
Latin schools, and a college, for both religious and civic ends. 
This type dominated New England, and is best represented by 
Massachusetts. From New England this attitude was carried 
westward by the migrations of New England people, and deeply 
influenced the educational development of all States to which the 
New Englander went in any large numbers. This was the edu- 
cational contribution of Calvinism to America.* Out of it our 
state school systems of to-day, by the separation of Church and 
State, have been evolved. 

The second was the parochial-school conception of the Dutch, 
Moravians, Mennonites, German Lutherans, German Reformed 
Church, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, and CathoHcs. This 
type is best represented by Protestant Pennsylvania and Catholic 
Maryland. It stood for church control of all educational efforts, 
resented state interference, was dominated only by church pur- 
poses, and in time came to be a serious obstacle in the way of 
rational state school organization and control. 

The third type, into which the second type tended to fuse, con- 
ceived of public education, aside from collegiate education, as 
intended chiefly for orphans and the children of the poor, and as 
a charity which the State was under Kttle or no obligation to 
assist in supporting. All children of the upper and middle classes 
in society attended private or church schools, or were taught by 
tutors in their homes, and for such instruction paid a proper tui- 
tion fee. Paupers and orphans, in limited numbers and for a 
limited time, might be provided with some form of useful educa- 
tion at the expense of either Church or State. This type is best 
represented by Anglican Virginia, which typified well the laissez- 

^ "Perhaps the most remarkable, because the most widespread and complex illus- 
tration of the educational genius of Calvinism is to be found in the American colo- 
nies, where the various European streams of Calvinism so converged that the seven- 
teenth-century colonists were predominantly Calvinists — not merely the Puritans 
of New England, but the Dutch, Walloons, Huguenots, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish, 
with a considerable Puritan admixture in Anglican Virginia and Catholic Maryland." 
(Foster, H. D., in Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education^ vol. i, p. 498.) 



374 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

faire policy which dominated England from the time of the 
Protestant Reformation until the latter half of the nineteenth 
century. 

These three types of attitude toward the provision of education 
became fixed American types, and each deeply influenced subse- 
quent American educational development, as we shall point out 
in a later chapter. 

Dominance of the religious motive. The seventeenth century 
was essentially a period of the transplanting, almost unchanged in 
form, of the characteristic European institutions, manners, reli- 
gious attitudes, and forms of government to American shores. 
Each sect or nationality on arriving set up in the new land the 
characteristic forms of church and school and social observances 
known in the old home-land. Dutch, Germans, English, Scotch, 
Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians — reproduced in 
the American colonies the main type of schools existing at the 
time of their migration in the mother land from which they came. 
They were also dominated by the same deep religious purpose. 

The dominance of this religious purpose in all instruction is 
well illustrated by the great beginning-school book of the time, 
The New England Primer. A digest of the contents of this, with 
a few pages reproduced, is given in R. 202. This book, from which 
all children learned to read, was used by Dissenters and Lutherans 
alike in the American colonies. This book Ford well characterizes 
in the following words: 

As one glances over what may truly be called "The Little Bible of 
New England," and reads its stern lessons, the Puritan mood is caught 
with absolute faithfulness. Here was no easy road to knowledge and 
salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their 
churches, with poetry as rough and stern as their storm-torn coast, 
with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial-smoothed 
boulders, between stiff oak covers which symbolized the contents, the 
children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan 
Edwards said, "young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers" 
to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge 
Sewell's child, they were afraid that they "should goe to hell," and were 
"stirred up dreadfully to seek God." God was made sterner and 
more cruel than any living judge, that all might be brought to realize 
how slight a chance even the least erring had of escaping eternal 
damnation. 

One learned to read chiefly that one might be able to read the 
Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly 
Father. There was scarcely any other purpose in the mainte- 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 375 

nance of elementary schools. In the grammar schools and the 
colleges students were ''instructed to consider well the main end 
of life and studies." These institutions existed mainly to insure 
a supply of learned ministers for service in Church and State. 
Such studies as history, geography, science, music, drawing, secu- 
lar literature, and organized play were unknown. Children were 
constantly surrounded, week days and Sundays, by the somber 
Calvinistic religious atmosphere in New England,^ and by the 
careful religious oversight of the pastors and elders in the colonies 
where the parochial-school system was the ruling plan for educa- 
tion. Schoolmasters were required to "catechise their scholars 
in the principles of the Christian religion," and it was made "a 
chief part of the schoolmaster's religious care to commend his 
scholars and his labors amongst them unto God by prayer morn- 
ing and evening, taking care that his scholars do reverently attend 
during the same." Religious matter constituted the only reading 
matter, outside the instruction in Latin in the grammar schools. 
The Catechism was taught, and the Bible was read and ex- 
pounded. Church attendance was required, and grammar-school 
pupils were obliged to report each week on the Sunday sermon. 
This insistence on the religious element was more prominent in 
Calvinistic New England than in the colonies to the south, but 
everywhere the rehgious purpose was dominant. The church 
parochial and charity schools were essentially schools for instilling 
the church practices and beUefs of the church maintaining them. 
This state of affairs continued until well toward the beginning of 
the nineteenth century. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Compare the conservative and radical groups in the English purification 
movement with the conservative and radical groups, as typified by Eras- 
mus and Luther, at the time of the Reformation. 

2. Show how, for each group, the schools estabHshed were merely home- 
land foreign-type religious schools, with nothing distinctively American 
about them. 

1 "To illustrate how omnipresent this religious atmosphere was, I cannot do 
better than to cite the occasion when Judge Sewell found that the spout which con- 
ducted the rain water from his roof did not perform its otTice. Af ler patient search- 
ing, a ball belonging to the small children was found lodged in the spout. There- 
upon the father sent for the minister and had a season of prayer with his boys 
that their mischief or carelessness might be set in its proper aspect and that the 
event might be sanctified to their spiritual good. Powers of darkness and of light 
were struggling for the possession of every soul, and it was the duty of parents, 
ministers, and teachers to lose no opportunity to pluck the children as brands from 
the burning." (Johnson Clifton, Oik-Time Schools and Sclwolbooks, p. 12.) 



376 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

3. Show why such copying of home-land types, even to the Latin grammar 
school, was perfectly natural. 

4. The provision of the Law of 1642 requiring instruction in "the capital 
laws of the country" was new. How do you explain this addition to 
mother-land practices? 

5. Show why the Law of 1642 was Calvinistic rather than Anglican in its 
origin. 

6. Explain the meaning of the preamble to the Law of 1647. 

7. Show how the Law of 1647 must go back for precedents to German, 
Dutch, and Scotch sources. 

8. Apply the six principles stated by Mr. Martin, as embodied in the legis- 
lation of 1647, to modern state school practice, and show how we have 
adopted each in our laws. 

9. Show also that the Law of 1647, as well as modern state school laws, is 
neither paternalistic nor socialistic in essential purpose. 

10. Show that, though the mixture of religious sects in Pennsylvania made 
colonial legislation difficult, still it would have been possible to have 
enforced the Massachusetts Law of 1642, or the Pennsylvania laws of 
1683 or 1693, in the colony. How do you explain the opposition and 
failure to do so? 

11. Show how the charity schools for the poor, and church missionary-society 
schools, were the natural outcome of the English attitude toward ele- 
mentary education. 

12. Which of the three type plans in the American colonies by 1750 most 
influenced educational development in your State? 

13. State the important contribution of Calvinism to our new-world life. 

14. Explain the indifference of the Anglican Church to general education 
during the whole of our colonial period. 

15. Explain what is meant by "The Puritan Church applied to its servant, 
the State," etc. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

183. Nichols: The Puritan Attitude. 

184. Gov. Bradford: The Puritans leave England. 

185. First Fruits: The Founding of Harvard College. 

186. First Fruits: The First Rules for Harvard College. 

(a) Entrance Requirements. 
{b) Rules and Precepts, 
(c) Time and Order of Studies. 
{d) Requirements for Degrees. 

187. College Charters: Extracts from, showing Privileges. 

(o) Harvard College, 1650. 
{h) Brown College, 1764. 

188. Dillaway: Founding of the Free School at Roxburie. 

189. Baird: Rules and Regulations for Hopkins Grammar School. 

190. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1642. 

191. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1647. 

192. Court Records: Presentment of Topsfield for Violating the Law of 
1642. 

193. Statutes: The Connecticut Law of 1650. 

194. Statutes: Plymouth Colony Legislation. 

195. Flatbush: Contract with a Dutch Schoolmaster. 



BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA 377 

196. New Amsterdam: Rules for a Schoolmaster in. 

197. Statutes: The Pennsylvania Law of 1683. 

198. Minutes of Council: The First School in Philadelphia. 

199. Murray: Early Quaker Injunctions regarding Schools. _ 

200. Statutes: Apprenticeship Laws in the Southern Colonies. 

(a) Virginia Statutes. 

(b) North CaroHna Court Records. 

201. Stiles: A New England Indenture of Apprenticeship. 

202. The New England Primer: Description and Digest. 



QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. What does the selection on The Puritan Attitude (183) reveal as to the 
extent and depth of the Reformation in England? 

2. Characterize the feehngs and emotions and desires of the Puritans, as 
expressed in the extract (184) from Governor Bradford's narrative. 

3. Characterize the spirit behind the founding of Harvard College, as 
expressed in the extract from New England's First Fruits (185). 

4. What was the nature and purpose of the Harvard College instruction as 
shown by the selection 186 a-d? 

5. Point out the similarity between the exemptions granted to Harvard 
College by the Legislature of the colony (187 a) and those granted to 
mediaeval universities (103-105). Compare the privileges granted 
Brown (187 b) and those contained in 104. 

6. Compare the founding of the Free School at Roxbury (188) with the 
founding of an English Grammar School (141-43). 

7. What does the distribution of scholars at Roxbury (188) show as to the 
character of the school? 

8. State the essentials of the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190). 

9. Compare the Massachusetts Law of 1642 and the English Poor-Law of 
1601 (190 with 174) as to fundamental principles involved in each. 

10. What does the court citation of Topsfield (192) show? 

11. What new principle is added (191) by the Law of 1647, and what does 
this new law indicate as to needs in the colony for classical learning? 

12. Show how the Connecticut Law of 1650 (193) was based on the Massa- 
chusetts Law (190) of 1642. 

13. What does the Plymouth Colony appeal for Harvard College (194 b) 
indicate as to community of ideas in early New England? 

14. What type of school was it intended to endow from the Cape Cod 
fisheries (194 c)? 

15. What is the difference between the Plymouth requirement as to gram- 
mar schools (194 d) and the Massachusetts requirement (191)? 

16. Compare the rules for the New Haven Grammar School (189) with those 
for Colet's London School (138 a-c). 

17. Characterize the early Dutch schools as shown by the rules for the 
schoolmaster (196) and the Flatbush contract (195). 

18. Just what type of education did the Quakers mean to provide for, as 
shown in the extract from their Rules of DiscipHne (199)? 

19. What kind of a school was the first one established in Philadelphia (198)? 

20. Compare the proposed Pennsjdvania Law of 1683 (197) and the Massa- 
chusetts Law of 1642 (190). 

21. What conception of education is revealed by the Virginia apprenticeship 
laws (200 a, 1-3) and the North Carolina court records (200 b, 1-3)? 

22. Characterize the New England Indenture of Apprenticeship given in 201. 



.^78 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 



Boone, R. G. Education in the United States. 
Brown, S. W. The Secularization of American EdncatiG,i. 
Cheyney, Edw. P. European Background of A merican Education. 
Dexter, E. G. A History of Education in the United States. 
*Eggleston, Edw. The Transit of Civilization. 
Fisk, C. R. "The English Parish and Education at the Beginning of 
American Civihzation"; in School Review, vol. 23, pp. 433-49. (Sep- 
tember, 191 5.) 
*Ford, P. L. The New Englafid Primer. 
*Heatwole, C. J. A History of Education in Virginia. 
Jackson, G. L. The Development of School Support in Colonial Massa- 
chusetts. 
*Kilpatrick, Wm. H. The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial 

New York. 
*Knight, E. W. Public School Education in North Carolina. 
*Martin, Geo. H. Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System. 
Seybolt, R. F. Apprenticeship and Apprentice Education in Colonial 
New York and New England. 
*Small, W. H. "The New England Grammar School"; in School Review 
vol. 10, pp. 513-31. (September, 1902.) 
Small, W. H. Early New Englatui Schools. 



CHAPTER XVI 
THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 

New attitudes after the eleventh century. From the begin- 
ning of the twelfth century onward, as we have already noted, 
there had been a slow but gradual change in the cnaracter of hu- 
man thinking, and a slow but certain disintegration of the Medi- 
aeval System, with its repressive attitude toward all independent 
thinking. Many different influences and movements had con- 
tributed to this change — the Moslem learning and civilization in 
Spain, the recovery of the old legal and medical knowledge, the 
revival of city life, the beginnings anew of commerce and indus- 
try, the evolution of the universities, the rise of a small scholarly 
class, the new consciousness of nationality, the evolution of the 
modern languages, the beginnings of a small but important ver- 
nacular literature, and the beginnings of travel and exploration 
following the Crusades — all of which had tended to transform 
the mediaeval man and change his ways of thinking. New ob- 
jects of interest slowly came to the front, and new standards of 
judgment gradually were applied. In consequence the mediaeval 
man, with his feeling of personal insignificance and lack of self- 
confidence, came to be replaced by a small but increasing number 
of men who were conscious of their powers, possessed a new self- 
confidence, and realized new possibiHties of intellectual accom- 
plishment. 

The Revival of Learning, first in Italy and then elsewhere in 
western Europe, was the natural consequence of this awakening 
of the modern spirit, and in the careful work done by the human- 
istic scholars of the ItaHan Renaissance in collecting, comparing, 
questioning, inferring, criticizing, and editing the texts, and in 
reconstructing the ancient life and history, we see the beginnings 
of the modern scientific spirit. It was this same critical, question- 
ing spirit which, when applied later to geographical knowledge, 
led to the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the 
globe; which, when appKed to matters of Christian faith, brought 
on the Protestant Revolts; which, when appHed to the problems 
of the universe, revealed the many wonderful fields of modern 
science; and which, when applied to government, led to a ques- 



38o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tioning of the divine right of kings and the rise of constitutional 
government. The awakening of scientific inquiry and the scien- 
tific spirit, and the attempt of a few thinkers to apply the new 
method to education, to which we now turn, may be regarded as 
only another phase of the awakening of the modern inquisitive 
spirit which found expression earlier in the rise of the universities, 
the recovery and reconstruction of the ancient learning, the 
tiwakening of geographical discovery and exploration, and the 
questioning of the doctrines and practices of the Mediaeval 
Church. 

Insufficiency of ancient science. From the point of viev/ of 
scientific inquiry, all ancient learning possessed certain marked 
fundamental defects. The Greeks had — • their time and age in 
world-civilization considered — made many notable scientific 
observations and speculations, and had prepared the way for 
future advances. Thales (636P-546? B.C.), Xenophanes (628?- 
520? B.C.), Anaximenes (557-504 B.C.), Pythagoras (570-500 
B.C.), Heraclitus (c. 500 B.C.), Empedocles (46o?-36i? B.C.), anc' 
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) had all made interesting speculations as 
to the nature of matter,^ Aristotle finally settUng the question 
by naming the world-elements as earth, water, air, fire, and ether. 
Hippocrates (460-367? B.C.), as we have seen (p. 197), had ob- 
served the sick and had recorded and organized his observations 
in such a manner ^ as to form the foundations upon which the 
science of medicine could be established. The Greek physician, 
Galen (130-200 a.d.) added to these observations, and their com- 
bined work formed the basis upon which modern medical science 
has slowly been built up. 

On the other hand, some of what each wrote was mere specula- 
tion and error,^ and modern physicians were compelled to begin 
all over and along new lines before any real progress in medicine 

1 Thales had guessed that water was the primal element from which all had been 
derived; Anaximanes guessed air; Heraclitus fire ; Pythagoras held that number was 
the essence of all things; Empedocles thought that fire and heat, accompanied by 
"indestructible forces," formed the basis; Xenophanes had guessed air, fire, 
water, and earth, and had worked out a complete scheme of creation. For an in- 
teresting discussion of these early attempts to explain creation, see J. W. Draper, 
History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. i, chap. iv. 

2 Among the treatises by him accepted as genuine are On Airs, Waters, and Places ; 
On Epidemics; On Regimen in Acute Diseases; On Fractures; and On Injuries of the 
Head. 

' For example, Hippocrates hdd held that the human body contains four "hu- 
mors" — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile — and that disease was caused 
by the undue accumulation of some one of these humors in some organ , which it was 
the business of the physician to get rid of by blood-letting, blistering, purging, or 
other means. 



THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 381 

could be made. Aristotle had done a notable work in organiz- 
ing and codifying Greek scientific knowledge, as the list of his 
many scientific treatises in use in Europe by 1300 (R. 87) will 
show, but his writings were the result of a mixture of keen ob- 
servation and brilliant speculation, contained many inaccuracies, 
and in time, due to the reverence accorded him as an authority 
by the medieeval scholars and the church authorities, proved 
serious obstacles to real scientific progress. 

At Alexandria the most notable Greek scientific work had been 
done. Euclid (323-283 B.C.) in geometry; Aristarchus (third 
century B.C.), who explained the motion of the earth; Eratos- 
thenes (270-196 B.C.), who measured the size of the earth; Archi- 
medes (27o?-2i2 B.C.), a pupil of Euclid's, who applied science in 
many ways and laid the foundations of dynamics; Hipparchus 
(160-125 B.C.), the father of astronomy, who studied the heavens 
and catalogued the stars, were among the more famous Greeks 
who studied and taught there in the days when Alexandria had 
succeeded Athens as the intellectual capital of the Greek world. 
Some remarkable advances also were made in the study of human 
anatomy and medicine by two Greeks, Herophilus (335-280 B.C.) 
and Erasistratus (d. 280 B.C.), who apparently did much dissecting. 

But even at Alexandria the promise of Greek science was unful- 
filled. Despite many notable speculations and scientific ad- 
vances, the hopeful beginnings did not come to any large fruitage, 
and the great contribution made by the Greeks to world civiliza- 
tion was less along scientific lines than along the Hues of Hterature 
and philosophy. Their great strength lay in the direction of 
philosophic speculation, and this tendency to speculate, rather 
than to observe and test and measure and record, was the funda- 
mental weakness of all Greek science. The Greeks never ad- 
vanced in scientific work to the invention and perfection of instru- 
ments for the standardization of their observations. As a result 
they passed on to the mediaeval world an extensive "book sci- 
ence" and not a little keen observation, of which the works of 
Aristotle and the Alexandrian mathematicians and astronomers 
form the most conspicuous examples, but little scientific knowl- 
edge of which the modern world has been able to make much use. 
The "book science" of the Greeks, and especially that of Aris- 
totle, was highly prized for centuries, but in time, due to the 
many inaccuracies, had to be discarded and done anew by modern 
scholars. 



382 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The Romans, as we have seen (chapter iii), were essentially a 
practical people, good at getting the work of the world done, but 
not much given to theoretical discussion or scientific speculation. 
They were organizers, governors, engineers, executives, and hter- 
ary workers rather than scientists. They executed many im- 
portant undertakings of a practical character, such as the build- 
ing of roads, bridges, aqueducts, and public buildings; organized 
government and commerce on a large scale; and have left us a 
literature and a legal system of importance, but they contributed 
little to the realm of pure science. The three great names in sci- 
ence in all their history are Strabo the geographer (63 B.C.-24 
A.D.); PHny the Elder (23-79 a.d.), who did notable work as an 
observer in natural history; and Galen (a Roman-Greek), in 
medicine. They, like the Greeks, were pervaded by the same 
fear that their science might prove useful, whereas they cultivated 
it largely as a mental exercise (R. 203). 

The Christian reaction against inquiry. The Christian attitude 
toward inquiry was from the first inhospitable, and in time be- 
came exceedingly intolerant. The tendency of the Western 
Church, it will be remembered (p. 94), was from the first to re- 
ject all Hellenic learning, and to depend upon emotional faith and 
the enforcement of a moral life. By the close of the third century 
the hostihty to pagan schools and Hellenic learning had become 
so pronounced that the Apostolic Constitutions (R. 41) ordered 
Christians to abstain from all heathen books, which could contain 
nothing of value and only served " to subvert the faith of the un- 
stable." In 401 A.D. the Council of Carthage forbade the clergy 
to read any heathen author, and Greek learning now rapidly died 
out in the West. For a time it was almost entirely lost. In con- 
sequence Greek science, then best represented by Alexandrian 
learning, and which contained much that was of great importance, 
was rejected along with other pagan learning. The very meager 
scientific knowledge that persisted into the Middle Ages in the 
great mediaeval textbooks (p. 162), as we have seen in the study 
of the Seven Liberal Arts (chapter vii), came to be regarded as 
useful only in explaining passages of Scripture or in illustrating 
the ways of God toward man. The one and only science worthy 
of study was Theology, to which all other learning tended (see 
Figure 44, p. 154). 

The history of Christianity throughout all the Dark Ages is a 
listory of the distrust of inquiry and reason, and the emphasis of 



THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 383 

blind emotional faith. Mysticism, good and evil spirits, and the 
interpretation of natural phenomena as manifestations of the Di- 
vine will from the first received large emphasis. The worship of 
saints and relics, and the great development of the sensuous and 
symbolic, changed the earher rehgion into a crude polytheism. 
During the long period of the Middle Ages the miraculous flour- 
ished. The most extreme superstition pervaded all ranks of soci- 
ety. Magic and prayers were employed to heal the sick, restore 
the crippled, foretell the future, and punish the wicked. Sacred 
pools, the royal touch, wonder-working images, and miracles 
through prayer stood in the way of the development of medicine 
(R. 204). Disease was attributed to satanic influence, and a regu- 
lar schedule of prayers for cures was in use. Sanitation was un- 
known. Plagues and pestilences were manifestations of Divine 
wrath, and hysteria and insanity were possession by the devil to 
be cast out by whipping and torture. One's future was deter- 
mined by the position of the heavenly bodies at the time of 
birth. Eclipses, meteors, and comets were fearful portents of 
Divine displeasure: 

Eight things there be a Comet brings, 

When it on high doth horrid rage; 
Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, 

War, Earthquakes, Floods, and Direful Change.^ 

The literature on magic was extensive. The most miraculous 
happenings were recorded and believed. Trial by ordeal, follow- 
ing careful religious formulae, was common before 1200, though 
prohibited shortly afterward by papal decrees (1215, 1222). The 
insistence of the Church on "the willful, devilish character of 
heresy," and the extension of heresy to cover almost any form of 
honest doubt or independent inquiry, caused an intellectual stag- 
nation along lines of scientific investigation which was not re- 
lieved for more than a thousand years. The many notable ad- 
vances in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine made by 
Moslem scholars (chapter viii) were lost on Christian Europe, 
and had to be worked out again centuries later by the scholars of 
the western world. Out of the astronomy of the Arabs the Chris- 
tians got only astrology; out of their chemistry they got only al- 
chemy. Both in time stood seriously in the wa}^ of real scientific 
thinking and discovery. 

1 From a collection of doggerel rhymes put out by two pastors and doctors of 
theology at Basle, in 1618, by the names of Grassner and Gross, to interpret the 
srthodox theory of comets to peasants and school children. 



384 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Growing tolerance changed by the Protestant Revolts. After 
the rise of the universities, the expansion of the minds of men 
which followed the Crusades and the revival of trade and indus- 
try, the awakening which came with the revival of the old learn- 
ing and the rise of geographical discovery, the church authorities 
assumed a broader and a more tolerant attitude toward inquiry 
and reason than had been the case for hundreds of years. It 
would have been surprising, with the large number of university- 
trained men entering the service of the Church, had this not been 
the case. By the middle of the fifteenth century it looked as 
though the Renaissance spirit might extend into many new direc- 
tions, and by 1500 the world seemed on the eve of important prog- 
ress in almost every Hne of endeavor. As was pointed out earlier 
(p. 259), the Church was more tolerant than it had been for cen- 
turies, and about the year 1500 was the most stimulating time in 
the history of our civilization since the days of Alexandria and 
ancient Rome. 

In 151 7 Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Witten- 
berg. The Church took alarm and attempted to crush him, and 
soon the greatest contest since the conflict between paganism and 
Christianity was on. Within half a century all northern lands 
had been lost to the ancient Church (see map, p. 296); the first 
successful challenge of its authority during its long history. 

The effect of these religious revolts on the attitude of the 
Church toward intellectual liberty was natural and marked. The 
tolerance of inquiry recently extended was withdrawn, and an era 
of steadily increasing intolerance set in which was not broken for 
more than a century. In an effort to stop the further spread of 
the heresy, the Church Council of Trent (1545-63) adopted 
stringent regulations against heretical teachings (p. 303), while 
the sword and torch and imprisonment were resorted to to stamp 
out opposition and win back the revolting lands. A century of 
merciless warfare ensued, and the hatreds engendered by the long 
and bitter struggle over religious differences put both Catholic 
and Protestant Europe in no tolerant frame of mind toward in- 
quiry or new ideas. The Inquisition, a sort of universal mediae- 
val grand Jury for the detection and punishment of heretics, was 
revived, and the Jesuits, founded in 1 534-40, were vigorous in de- 
fense of the Church and bitter in their opposition to all forms of 
independent inquiry and Protestant heresy. 

It was into this post-Reforn\ation atmosphere of suspicion and 



THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 385 

distrust and hatred that the new critical, inquiring, questioning 
spirit of science, as applied to the forces of the universe, was born. 
A century earlier the first scientists might have obtained a respect- 
ful hearing, and might have been permitted to press their claims; 
after the Protestant Revolts had torn Christian Europe asunder 
this could hardly be. As a result the early scientists found them- 
selves in no enviable position. Their theories were bitterly as- 
sailed as savoring of heresy; their methods and purposes were 
alike suspected; and any challenge of an old long-accepted idea 
was likely to bring a punishment that was swift and sure. From 
the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth cen- 
tury was not a time when new ideas were at a premium anywhere 
in western Europe. It was essentially a period of reaction, and 
periods of reaction are not favorable to intellectual progress. It 
was into this century of reaction that modern scientific inquiry 
and reasoning, itself another form of expression of the intellectual 
attitudes awakened by the work of the humanistic scholars of the 
Italian Renaissance, made its first claim for a hearing. 

The beginnings of modern scientific method. One of the great 
problems which has always deeply interested thinking men in all 
lands is the nature and constitution of the material universe, and 
to this problem people in all stages of civilization have worked 
out for themselves some kind of an answer. It was one of the 
great speculations of the Greeks, and it was at Alexandria, in the 
period of its decadence, that the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy 
(138 A.D.) had offered an explanation which was accepted by 
Christian Europe and which dominated all thinking on the sub- 
ject during the Middle Ages. He had concluded that the earth 
was located at the center of the visible universe, immovable, and 
that the heavenly bodies moved around the earth, in circular 
motion, fixed in crystalline spheres.^ This explanation accorded 
perfectly with Christian ideas as to creation, as well as with 
Christian conceptions as to the position and place of man and his 
relation to the heavens above and to a hell beneath. This theory 

1 "The earth is-^ sphere, situated in the center of the heavens; if it were not, 
one side of thp^iieavens would appear nearer to us than the other, and the stars 
would b©-tefger there. The earth is but a point in comparison to the heavens, 
because the stars appear of the same magnitude and at the same distance ifiter se, 
no matter where the observer goes on the earth. It has no motion of translation. 
... If there were a motion, it would be proportionate to the great mass of the earth 
and would leave behind animals and objects thrown into the air. This also dis- 
proves the suggestion made by some, that the earth, while immovable in space, 
turns round on its own axis." (Ptolemy, Digest of argument of Book i of the 
Almagest.) 



386 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




was obviously simple and satisfactory, and became sanctified 
with time. As we see it now the wonder is that such an explana- 
tion could have been accepted for so long. Only among an unin- 
quisitive people could so imperfect a theory have endured for 
over fourteen centuries. 

In 1543 a German-Polish church canon and physician named 
Nicholas Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orhium 
Celestium, in which he set forth the explan- 
ation of the universe which we now know. 
He piously dedicated the work to Pope 
Paul III, and wisely refrained from pub- 
lishing it until the year of his death. ^ Any- 
thing so completely upsetting the Christian 
conception as to the place and position of 
man in the universe could hardly be ex- 
pected to be accepted, particularly at the 
time of its publication, without long and 
bitter opposition. 

In the dedicatory letter (R. 205), Coper- 
nicus explains how, after feeling that the 
Ptolemaic explanation was wrong, he came 
to arrive at the conclusions he did. The 
steps he set forth form an excellent example of a method of think- 
ing now common, but then almost unknown. They were: 

1, Dissatisfaction with the old Ptolemaic explanation, 

2, A study of all known literature, to see if any "better explanation 
had been offered, 

3, Careful thought on the subject, until his thinking took form in a 
definite theory, 

4, Long observation and testing out, to see if the observed facts 
would support his theory, 

5, The theory held to be correct, because it reduced all known facts 
to a systematic order and harmony. 

This is as clear a case of inductive reasoning as was L. Valla's 
exposure of the forgery of the so-called " Donation of Constan- 
tine," an example of deductive reasoning. Both used a new 
method — the method of modern scholarship. In both cases 
the results were revolutionary. As Valla stands forth as the first 
Critical classical scholar of modern times, so Copernicus stands 

" In the dedicatory letter Copernicus states that he had had the completed manu- 
script in his study for thirty-six years, and published it now only on the urging of 
friends. 



Fig. 113. 

Nicholas Kopernik 
(Copernicus), 
(1473-1543) 



THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 387 



forth as the first modern scientific thinker. The beginnings of 
all modern scientific investigation date from 1543. Of his work a 
recent writer (E. C. J. Morton) has said: 

Copernicus cannot be said to have flooded with light the dark places 
of nature — in the way that one stupendous mind subsequently did — 
but still, as we look back through the long vista of the history of science, 
the dim Titanic figure of the old monk seems to rear itself out of the 
dull flats around it, pierces with its head the mists that overshadow 
them, and catches the first gleam of the rising sun, . . . 
Like some iron peak, by the Creator 
Fired with the red glow of the rushing mom. 

The new method of inquiry applied by others. At first Coper- 
nicus' work attracted but little attention. An Italian Dominican 
by the name of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), deeply impressed 
by the new theory, set forth in Latin and Italian the far-reaching 
and majestic impHcations of such a theory 
of creation, and was burned at the stake 
at Rome for his pains. A Dane, Tycho 
Brahe, after twenty-one years of careful 
observation of the heavens, during which 
time he collected "a magnificent series 
of observations, far transcending in ac- 
curacy ^ and extent anything that had 
been accomplished by his predecessors," 
showed Aristotle to be wrong in many 
particulars. His observations of the 
comet of 1577 led him to conclude that 
the theory of crystalHne spheres was im- 
possible, and that the common view of 
the time as to their nature ^ was absurd. 
In 1609 a German by the name of Johann Kepler (15 71-1630), 
using the records of observations which Tycho Brahe had accu- 
mulated and applying them to the planet Mars, proved the 
truth of the Copernican theory and framed his famous three 
laws for planetary motion. 

^ To secure the greatest possible accuracy he constructed a wooden outdoor 
quadrant some ten feet in radius, with a brass scale, thus permitting readings to a 
fraction of an inch. 

- "The current view was that comets were formed by the ascending of human 
sins from the earth, that they were changed into a kind of gas, and ignited by the 
anger of God. This poisoned stuff then fell down on people's heads, causing all 
kinds of mischief, such as pestilence, sudden death, storms, etc." (Dryer, J. L. E.. 
Tycho Brahe.) 




Fig. 114. Tycho Brake 
(1546-1601) 



388 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 115. Galileo 
Galilei (1564-1642) 



Finally an Italian, Galileo Galilei, a professor at the University 
of Pisa, developing a telescope that would magnify to eight diam- 
eters, discovered Jupiter's satellites and Saturn's rings. The 
story of his discovery of the satellites of 
Jupiter is another interesting illustration 
of the careful scientific reasoning of these 
early workers (R. 206) . Gahleo also made 
a number of discoveries in physics, through 
the use of new scientific methods, which 
completely upset the teachings of the 
Aristotelians, and made the most notable 
advances in mechanics since the days of 
Archimedes. For his pronounced advo- 
cacy of the Copernican theory he was 
called to Rome (16 15) by the Cardinals 
of the Inquisition, the Copernican theory 
was condemned as '' absurd in philosophy " 
and as "expressly contrary to Holy Scripture," and Galileo was 
compelled to recant (1616) his error.^ For daring later (1632) to 
assume that he might, under a new Pope, defend the Copernican 
theory, even in an indirect manner, he was again called before the 
inquisitorial body, compelled to recant 
and abjure his errors (R. 207) to escape 
the stake, and was then virtually made 
a prisoner of the Inquisition for the 
remainder of his life. So strongly had 
the forces of mediasvalism reasserted 
themselves after the Protestant Re- 
volts! 

Finally the EngHsh scholar Newton 
(1642-1727), in his Principia (1687), 
settled permanently all discussions as 
to the Copernican theory by his won- 
derful mathematical studies. He dem- 
onstrated mathematically the motions 
of the planets and comets, proved Kepler's laws to be true, ex- 
plauied gravitation and the tides, made clear the nature of light, 

1 "For over fifty years he was the knight miHtant of science, and almost alone 
did successful battle with the hosts of Churchmen and Aristotehans who attacked 
him on all sides — one man against a world of bigotry and ignorance. If then . . . 
when face to face with the terrors of the Inquisition he, like Peter, denied his Master, 
no honest man, knowing all the circumstances, will be in a hurry to blame him." 
(Fahie, J. J., Galileo, His Life and Work.) 




Fig. 116. Sir Isaac Newton 
(1642-1727) 



THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 389 



and reduced dynamics to a science. Of his work a recent writer, 
Karl Pearson, has said: 

The Newtonian laws of motion form the starting point of most 
modern treatises on dynamics, and it seems to me that physical science, 
thus started, resembles the mighty genius of an Arabian tale emerging 
amid metaphysical exhalations from the bottle in which for long centu- 
ries it had been corked down. 

So far-reaching in its importance was the scientific work of New- 
ton that Pope's couplet seems exceedingly applicable : 

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; 
God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light. 

The new method applied in other fields. The new method of 
study was soon applied to other fields by scholars of the new type, 
here and there, and always with fruitful results. The EngHsh- 
man, William Gilbert (i 540-1603) pubhshed, in 1600, his De 
Arte Magnetica, and laid the foundations of the modern study of 
electricity and magnetism. A German-Swiss by the name of Ho- 
henheim, but who Latinized his name to Paracelsus (1493-1541), 
and who became a professor in the medical faculty at the Univer- 
sity of Basle, in 1526 broke with mediaeval traditions by being one 
of the first university scholars to refuse to lecture in Latin. He 
ridiculed the medical theories of Hippocrates (p. 197) and Galen 
(p. 198), and, regarding the human body as a chemical compound, 
began to treat diseases by the administra- 
tion of chemicals. A Saxon by the name 
of Landmann, who also Latinized his 
name to Agricola (1494-1555), applied 
chemistry to mining and metallurgy, and 
a French potter named Bernard Palissy 
(c. 1500-88) applied chemistry to pottery 
and the arts. To Paracelsus, Agricola, 
and Palissy we are indebted for having 
laid, in the sixteenth century, the founda- 
tions of the study of modern chemistry. 

A Belgian by the name of Vesalius 
(1514-64) was the first modern to dissect 
the human body, and for so doing was 
sentenced by the Inquisition to perform a 
penitential journey to Jerusalem. One of his disciples discovered 
the valves in the veins and was the teacher of the Englishman, 
William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood and 




Fig. 117. William 
Harvey (1578-1657) 



390 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

later (1628) dared to publish the fact to the world. These men 
established the modern studies of anatomy and physiology. 
Another early worker was a Swiss by the name of Conrad Gess- 
ner (1516-65), who observed and wrote extensively on plants and 
animals, and who stands as the first naturalist of modern times. 

The sixteenth century thus marks the rise of modern scientific 
inquiry, and the beginnings of the study of modern science. The 
number of scholars engaged in the study was still painfully small, 
and the religious prejudice against which they worked was strong 
and powerful, but in the work of these few men we have not only 
the beginnings of the study of modern astronomy, physics, chem- 
istry, metallurgy, medicine, anatomy, physiology, and natural 
history, but also the beginnings of a group of men, destined in 
time to increase greatly in number, who could see straight, and 
who sought facts regardless of where they might lead and what 
preconceived ideas they might upset. How deeply the future of 
civilization is indebted to such men, men who braved social ostra- 
cism and often the wrath of the Church as well, for the, to them, 
precious privilege of seeing things as they are, we are not likely to 
over-estimate. In time their work was destined to reach the 
schools, and to materially modify the character of all education. 
Human reason in the investigation of nature. To the English 
statesman and philosopher, Francis Bacon, more than to any one 

else, are we indebted for the proper 
formulation and statement of this new 
scientific method. Though not a sci- 
entist himself, he has often been 
termed "the father of modern sci- 
ence." Seeing clearly the importance 
of the new knowledge, he broke en- 
tirely with the old scholastic deduc- 
tive logic as expressed in the Organon, 
of Aristotle, and formulated and ex- 
pressed the methods of inductive rea- 
soning in his Novum Organum, pub- 

^^°" 'fi'.Ji^i6?6^) ^^^^"^ ^^^^^ ^^ '^^°- ^^ ^^^ ^^ showed the 
■^ " insufficiency of the method of argu- 

mentation; analyzed and formulated the inductive method of 
reasoning, of which his study as to the nature of heat ^ is a good 

1 See Routledge, R., A Popular History of Science, pp. 135-36, for a good digest of 
bacon's inductive investigation, as a result of which he arrived at the conclusion that 
•'Heat is an expansive bridled motion, struggling in the small particles of bodies." 




THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 391 

example; and pointed out that knowledge is a process, and not 
an end in itself; and indicated the immense and fruitful field of 
science to which the method might be apphed. By showing how 
to learn from nature herself he turned the Renaissance energy 
into a new direction, and made a revolutionary break with the 
disputations and deductive logic of the Aristotehan scholastics 
which had for so long dominated university instruction. 

In formulating the new method he first pointed out the defects 
of the learning of his time, which he classified under the head of 
*' distempers," three in number, and as follows: 

1. Fantastic learning: Alchemy, magic, miracles, old- wives' tales, 
credulities, superstitions, pseudo-science, and impostures of all sorts 
inherited from an ignorant past, and now conserved as treasures of 
knowledge. 

2. Contentious learning: The endless disputations of the Scholastics 
about questions which had lost their significance, deductive in char- 
acter, not based on any observation, not aimed primarily to arrive at 
truth, "fruitful of controversy, and barren of effect." 

3. Delicate learning: The new learning of the humanistic Renais- 
sance, verbal and not real, stylish and polished but not socially impor- 
tant, and leading to nothing except a mastery of itself. 

As an escape from these three types of distempers, which well 
characterized the three great stages in human progress from the 
sixth to the fifteenth centuries, Bacon offered the inductive 
method, by means of which men would be able to distinguish true 
from false, learn to see straight, create useful knowledge, and fill 
in the great gaps in the learning of the time by actually working 
out new knowledge from the unknown. The collecting, organiz- 
ing, comparing, questioning, and inferring spirit of the humanistic 
revival he now turned in a new direction by organizing and formu- 
lating for the work a new Organum to take the place of the old 
Organon of Aristotle. In Book I he sets forth some of the difficul- 
ties (R. 208) with which those who try new experiments or work 
out new methods of study have to contend from partisans of old 
ideas. 

The Novum Organum showed the means of escape from the er- 
rors of two thousand years by means of a new method of thinking 
and work. Bacon did not invent the new method — it had been 
used since man first began to reason about phenomena, and was 
the method by means of which WycUffe, Luther, Magellan, Co- 
pernicus, Brahe, and Gilbert had worked — but he was the first to 
formulate it clearly and to point out the vast field of new and use- 



392 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ful knowledge that might be opened up by applying human rea- 
son, along inductive lines, to the investigation of the phenomena 
of nature. His true service to science lay in the completeness of 
his analysis of the inductive process, and his declaration that 
those who wish to arrive at useful discoveries must travel by that 
road. As Macaulay well says, in his essay on Bacon: 

He was not the maker of that road; he was not the discoverer of that 
road ; he was not the person who first surveyed and mapped that road. 
But he was the person who first called the public attention to an inex- 
haustible mine of wealth which had been utterly neglected, and which 
was accessible by that road alone. 

To stimulate men to the discovery of useful truth, to turn the 
energies of mankind — even slowly — from assumption and dis- 
putation to patient experimentation/ and to give an impress to 
human thinking which it has retained for centuries, is, as Macau- 
lay well says, "the rare prerogative of a few imperial spirits." 
Macaulay's excellent summary of the importance of Bacon's 
work (R. 209) is well worth reading at this poiht. 

The new method in the hands of subsequent workers. By the 
middle of the seventeenth century many important advances had 
been made in many different lines of scientific work. In the two 
centuries between 1450 and 1650, the foundations of modern 
mathematics and mechanics had been laid. At the beginning of 
the period Arabic notation and the early books of Euclid were 
about all that were taught; at its end the western world had 
worked out decimals, symbolic algebra, much of plane and spher- 
ical trigonometry, mechanics, logarithms (1614) and analytic ge- 
ometry (1637), and was soon to add the calculus (1667-87). 
Mercator had published the map of the world (1569) which has 
ever since born his name, and the Gregorian calendar had been 
introduced (1572). The barometer, thermometer, air-pump, pen- 
dulum clock, and the telescope had come into use in the period. 
Alchemy had passed over into modern chemistry ; and the astrolo- 
ger was finding less and less to do as the astronomer took his place. 
The English Hippocrates, Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), during 
this period laid the foundations of modern medical study, and the 
microscope was apphed to the study of organic forms. Modern 
ideas as to light and optics and gases, and the theory of gravita- 

^ Bacon himself died a victim of one of his inductive experiments. Wishing to 
try out his theory that cold would prevent or retard putrefaction, he killed a 
chicken, cleaned it, and packed it in snow. In so doing he contracted a cold which 
caused his death. 



THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 393 




Fig. 119. The Loss and Recovery of the Sciences 

EacTi short horizontal line indicates the life-span of a very distinguished scholar in 
the science. Mohammedan scientists have not been included. The relative neg- 
lect or ignorance of a science has been indicated by the depth of the shading. The 
great loss to civilization caused by the barbarian inroads and the hostile attitude of 
the early Church is evident. 



tion, were about to be set forth. All these advances had been 
made during the century following the epoch-making labors of 
Copernicus, the first modern scientific man to make an impression 
on the thinking of mankind. 

Accompanying this new scientific work there arose, among a 
few men in each of the western European countries, an interest in 
scientific studies such as the world had not witnessed since the 
days of the Alexandrian Greek. This interest found expression in 
the organization of scientific societies, wholly outside the univer- 
sities of the time, for the reporting of methods and results, and 
for the mingling together in sympathetic companionship of these 
seekers after new truth. The most important dates connected 
with the rise of these societies are: 

1603. The Lyncean Society at Rome. 

1619. Jungius founded the Natural Science Association at Rostock. 

1645. The Royal Society of London began to meet; constituted in 

1660; chartered in 1662. 
1657. The Academia del Cimento at Florence. 
1662. The Imperial Academy of Germany. 
1666. The Academy of Sciences in France. 
1675. The National Observatory at Greenwich established. 

After 1650 the advance of science was rapid. The spirit of 
modern inquiry, which in the sixteenth century had animated but 
a few minds, by the middle of the seventeenth had extended to all 



394 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



the principal countries of Europe. The striking results obtained 
during the seventeenth century revealed the vast field waiting to 
be explored, and filled many independent modern-type scholars 
with an enthusiasm for research in the new domain of science. 
By the close of the eighteenth century the main outlines of most 
of the modern sciences had been established. 

Leading thinkers outside the universities. During the seven- 
teenth century, and largely during the eighteenth as well, the ex- 
treme conservatism of the universities, their continued control by 
their theological faculties, and their continued devotion to theo- 
logical controversy and the teachings of state orthodoxy rather 
than the advancement of knowledge, served to make of them such 
inhospitable places for the new scientific method that practically 
all the leading workers with it were found outside the universities. 
This was less true of England than other lands, but was in part 
true of EngHsh universities as well. As civil servants, court at- 
taches, pensioners of royalty, or as private citizens of means they 
found, as independent scholars reporting to the recently formed 
scientific societies, a freedom for investigation and a tolerance of 
ideas then scarcely possible anywhere in the university world. 

Tycho Brahe and Kepler were pensioners of the Emperor at 
Prague. Lord Bacon was a lawyer and political leader, and be- 
came a peer of England. Descartes, the 
mathematician and founder of modern 
philosophy, to whom we are indebted for 
conic sections; Napier, inventor of loga- 
rithms; and Ray and Willoughby, who 
did the first important work in botany 
and zoology in England, were all inde- 
pendent scholars. The air-pump was in- 
vented by the Burgomaster of Madgeburg. 
Huygens, the astronomer and inventor of 
the clock was a pensioner of the King of 
France. Cassini, who explained the mo- 
tion of Jupiter's satelHtes, was Astron- 
omer Royal at Paris. Halley, who demon- 
strated the motions of the moon and who first predicted the return 
of a comet, held a similar position at Greenwich. Van Helmont and 
Boyle, who together laid the foundations of our chemical knowl- 
edge, were both men of noble Hneage who preferred the study of 
the new sciences to a life of ease at court. Harvey was a physi- 




Fig. 1 20. Rene 
Descartes (i 506-1650) 



THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 395 

cian and demonstrator of anatomy in London. Sydenham, the 
English Hippocrates, was a pensioner of Cromwell and a physi- 
cian in Westminster. The German mathematical scholar, Leib- 
nitz, who jointly with Newton discovered the calculus, scorned a 
university professorship and remained an attache of a German 
court. Newton, though for a time a professor at Cambridge, dur- 
ing most of his mature life held the royal office of Warden of the 
Mint. These are a few notable illustrations of scientific scholars 
of the first rank who remained outside the universities to obtain 
advantages and freedom not then to be found within their walls. 
Much these same conditions continued throughout most of the 
eighteenth century, during which many remarkable advances in 
all lines of pure science were made. By the close of this century 
the universities had been sufficiently modernized that scientific 
workers began to find in them an atmosphere conducive to scien- 
tific teaching and research; during the nineteenth century they 
became the homes of scientific progress and instruction; to-day 
they are deeply interested in the promotion of scientific research. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Show that the rise of scientific inquiry was but another manifestation 
of the same inquiring spirit which had led to the recovery of the ancient 
hteratures and history. 

2. What do you understand to be meant by the failure of the Greeks to 
standardize their observations by instruments? 

3. Show that it would be possible largely to determine the character of a 
civilization, if one knew only the prevailing ideas and conceptions as to 
scientific and religious matters. 

4. Show the two different types of reasoning involved in the deduction of 
L. Valla (p. 246) and the induction of Copernicus. 

5. Of which type was the reasoning of Galileo as to Jupiter's satellites? 

6. Show that the three "distempers" described by Bacon characterize the 
three great stages in human progress from the sixth to the fifteenth 
centuries. 

7. How do you explain the long rejection of the new sciences by the univer- 
sities? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced: 

203. Macaulay: Attitude of the Ancients toward Scientific Inquiry. 

204. Franck: The Credulity of Mediaeval People. 

205. Copernicus: How he arrived at the theory he set forth. 

206. Brewster: Galileo's Discovery of the Satellites of Jupiter. 

207. Inquisition: The Abjuration of Galileo. 

208. Bacon: On Scientific Progress. 

209. Macaulay: The Importance of Bacon's Work. 



396 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. How do you explain the attitude of the ancients toward scientific inquiry 
(203, 208)? 

2. State the ancient purpose in pursuing scientific studies (203). 

3. Contrast Bacon and Plato as to aims (203). 

4. Show that the thinking of Copernicus as to the motions of the heavenly 
bodies (205) was an excellent example of inductive thinking. 

5. Show that the discovery and reasoning of Galileo (206) was an example 
of the common method of reasoning of to-day. 

6. Were the difficulties that surrounded scientific inquiry and progress, as 
described by Bacon (208), easily removed? 

7. Explain the readiness with which the clergy have so commonly opposed 
scientific inquiry for fear that the results might upset preconceived theo- 

. logical ideas. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Ball, W. R. R. History of Mathematics at Cambridge. 
*Libby, Walter. An Introduction to the History of Science. 
Ornstein, Martha. Role of the Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth 
Century. 
*Routledge, Robert. A Popular History of Science. 
*Sedgwick, W. T. and Tyler, H. W. A Short History of Science. 
*White, A. D. History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 2 vols. 
Wordsworth Christopher. Scholce Academicce; Studies at the English 
Universities in the Eighteenth Century. 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE NEW SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 

The rise of realism in education. As will be remembered from 
our study of the educational results of the Revival of Learning 
(chapter xi), the new schools established, in the reaction against 
mediaevahsm, to teach pux£_Latin and Greek, in time became 
formal and lifeless (p. 283), and their aim came to be almost en- 
tirely that of imparting a masterjLfif the Qceronian style, both in_ 
v/riting and in speech. This idea, first clearly inaugurated by 
Sturm at Strassburg (R. 137), had now become fixed, and in its 
extreme is illustrated by the teachings of the Jesuit Campion at 
Prague (R. 146). As a reaction against this extreme position of 
the humanistic scholars there arose, during the sixteenth century, 
and as a further expression of the new critical spirit awakened by 
the Revival of Learning, a demand for a type of education which 
would make truth rather than beauty, and the reaHties of the life 
of the time rather than the beauties of a life of Roman days, the 
aim and purpose of education. This new spirit became known as 
Realism, was contemporaneous with the rise of scientific inquiry, 
and was an expression of a similar dissatisfaction with the learning 
of the time. As applied to education this new spirit may be said 
to have manifested itself in three different stages, as follows: 

1. Humanistic reaHsm. 

2. Social realism. 

3. Sense realism. 

We will explain each of these, briefly, in order. 

I. HUMANISTIC REALISM 

A new aim in instruction. Humanistic realism represents the 
beginning of the reaction against form and style and in favor of 
ideas and content. The humanistic reaUsts were in agreement 
with the classical humanists that the old classical literatures and 
the Bible contained all that was important in the education of 
youth. The ancient literatures, they held, presented "not only 
the widest product of human intelhgence, but practically all that 
was worthy of man's attention." The two groups differed, how- 
ever, in that the classical humanists conceived the aim of educa- 



398 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tion to be the mastery of the vocabulary and style of Cicero, and 
the production of a new race of Roman youths for a revived Latin 
scholarly world, while the new humanistic realists wanted to use 
the old literatures as a means to a new end — that of teaching 
knowledge that would be useful in the world in which they lived. 
Monroe has so well expressed the humanistic-realist attitude that 
a passage from his History is worth quoting here. He says: 

Not only did ancient philosophy contain the true philosophy of this 
life, but languages were the key to the real understanding of the Chris- 
tian religion. Not only did mastery of these languages give power of 
speech, and hence influence over one's fellows; but, if military science 
was to be studied, it could in no place be better searched for than in 
Caesar and in Xenophon; was agriculture to be practiced, no better 
guide was to be found than Virgil or Columella ; was architecture to be 
mastered, no better way existed than through Vitruvius; was geog- 
raphy to be considered, it must be through Mela or Solinus; was medi- 
cine to be understood, no better means than Celsus existed; was natural 
history to be appreciated, there was no more adequate source of infor- 
mation than Pliny and Seneca. Aristotle furnished the basis of all 
the sciences, Plato of all philosophy, Cicero of all institutional life, 
and the Church Fathers and the Scriptures of all religion. 

Exponents of humanistic realism. The Dutch international 
scholar Erasmus (i467?-i536) (p. 274), the Frenchman Rabelais 
(1483-1553), and the English poet Milton (1608-74) stand as the 
clearest representatives of this new humanistic realism. 

Erasmus had clearly distinguished between the education of 
words and the education of things, had pointed out the ease with 
which real truth is learned and retained, and had urged the study 
of the content rather than the form of the ancient authors. In 
his System of Studies he said : 

From these very authors (Latin and Greek), whom we read for the 
sake of improving our language, incidentally, in no small degree is a 
knowledge of things gathered. 

In his Ciceronian he had ridiculed those who mistook the form for 
the spirit of the ancients. 

The French non-conforming monk, cure, physician, and uni- 
versity scholar, Frangois Rabelais, in his satirical Life of Gargan- 
tua (1535) and The Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel (1533) had set 
forth, even more clearly, the idea of obtaining from a study of the 
ancient authors (R. 210) knowledge that would be useful. Writ- 
ing largely in the character of a clown and a fool, because such was 
a safer method, he protested against the formal, shallow, and in- 




SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 399 

sincere life of his age. He made as vigorous a protest against 
mediaevalism and formalism as he dared, for he lived in a time 
when new ideas were dangerous commodities for one to carry 
about or to try to express. He ridiculed the 
old scholastic learning, set forth the idea of 
using the old classics for realistic as well 
as humanistic ends, and also advocated 
physical, moral, social, and religious edu- 
cation in the spirit of the best writers and 
teachers of the Italian Renaissance. His 
book was extensively read and had some 
influence in shaping thinking, though Rabe- 
lais's importance in the history of education 
lies rather in his influence on later educa- 
tional thinkers than on the life of his time. 

Perhaps the clearest example of human- ^ 121. Francois 
,. . r J • 4.U V f ^u Rabelais (1483-1553) 

istic realism is found in the writings of the 

English poet and humanitarian, John Milton. His Tractate on 
Education (1644) was extensively read, and was influential in 
shaping educational practice in the non-conformist secondary 
academies which arose a Httle later in England. Still later his 
ideas indirectly somewhat influenced American development. 

Milton first gives us an excellent statement of the new religious- 
civic aim of post-Reformation education (R. 211), and then 
points out the defects of the existing education, whereby boys 
"spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much 
miserable Latine and Greek, as might be learnt otherwise easily 
and delightfully in one year." He then presents his plan for "a 
compleat and generous Education" for "noble and gentle 
youths," and tells "how all this may be done between twelve and 
one and twenty, less time than is now bestowed in pure trifling 
at Grammar and Sophistry." The course of study he outHnes 
(R. 212) is enormous. The first year, that is beginning at twelve, 
the boy is to learn Latin grammar, arithmetic, and geometry, and 
to read simple Latin and Greek. During the next three or four 
years the pupil is to master Greek, and to study agriculture, geog- 
raphy, natural philosophy, physiology, mathematics, fortifica- 
tion, engineering, architecture, and natural history, all by reading 
the chief writings of the ancients, in prose and poetry, on these 
subjects. During the remaining years to twenty-one the pupil, 
similarly, is to obtain ethical instruction from the Greeks and the 



400 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Bible; learn Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Saxon law; learn Italian 
and Hebrew; and study economics, politics, history, logic, rhet- 
oric, and poetry by reading selected ancient authors. What 
Rabelais suggested in Jest for his giant, Milton adopted as a pro- 
gram for the school. In addition, in thoroughly characteristic 
modern English fashion, he makes careful provision for daily exer- 
cise and play. Aside, though, from its impossibihty of accom- 
plishment except by a superior few, Milton's plan is thoroughly 
representative of the new humanistic- 
reaUstic point of view — that is, that edu- 
cation should impart useful information, 
though the information as Milton con- 
ceived it was to be drawn almost entirely 
from the books of the ancients. 

Educational results of humanistic real- 
ism. The importance of humanistic real- 
ism in the history of education lies largely 
in that it was the first of a series of reac- 
tions that led later to sense-realism — 
that is, to the study of science and the 
appHcation of scientific method in the 
schools. 

In England it possesses still larger im- 
portance. Milton had called his insti- 
tution an "Academy." ^ After the restoration of the Stuarts 
(Charles II, 1660), some two thousand non-conforming clergy- 
men were "dispossessed" by the Act of Conformity (1662; 
R. 166), and soon after this the children of Non-Conformists 
were excluded from the grammar schools and universities. 
Many of these clergymen now turned to teaching as a means of 
earning a livelihood and serving their people, and the ideas of the 
non-conformist Milton were influential in turning the schools 
thus estabHshed even further toward the study of useful subjects. 
Many of the new schools offered instruction in the modern 
languages, logic, rhetoric, ethics, geography, astronomy, algebra, 
geometry, trigonometry, surveying, navigation, history, oratory, 

^ See footnote i, p. 272, on the origin of the term. Six years before the publica- 
tion of the Tractate, Milton had visited Italy, and had been much entertained in 
Florence by members of the Academy and University there. In the Tractate he 
outlined a plan for a series of classical Academies for England, many of which were 
established. From England the term was carried to America, and became the name 
for a great development of semi-private secondary schools which flourished during 
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. i^ 




Fig. 



122. John Milton 
(1608-74) 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 401 

economics, and natural and moral philosophy, as well as the old 
classical subjects. All teaching, too, was done in English, and the 
study of English language and literature was emphasized. This 
made these non-conformist academies in many respects superior 
to the older Latin grammar schools. After the enactment of the 
Toleration Act, in 1689, these schools were allowed to incorporate 
and were gradually absorbed into the existing Latin grammar- 
school system of England, but unfortunately without producing 
much change in the character of these older institutions. 

The idea of offering instruction in these new studies was in 
time carried to America, where better results were obtained. At 
first a few of the subjects, such as the mathematical studies, sur- 
veying, navigation, and EngKsh, were introduced into the existing 
Latin grammar or other schools of secondary grade. Especially 
was this true in the colonies south of New England. After 1751, 
and especially after about 1780, distinct Academies arose in the 
United States (chapter xviii), whose^purpose was to offer instruc- 
tion in all these new subjects of study. From these our modern 
high schools have been derived. 



II. SOCIAL REALISM 

Montaigne and Locke. Social realism represents a still further 
reaction away from the humanistic schools. It was the natural 
reaction of practical men of the new world 
against a type of education that tended 
to perpetuate the pedantry of an earKer 
age, by devoting its energies to the pro- 
duction of the scholar and professional 
man to the neglect of the man of affairs. 
The social realists were small in number, 
but powerful because of their important 
social connections and wealth, and they 
were very determined to have an educa- 
tion suited to their needs, even if they had 
to create it themselves (R. 213). The 
French nobleman, scholar, author, and 
civic officer, M. de Montaigne (1533-92), 
and the English philosopher, John Locke 
(1632-1704), were the clearest exponents of this new point of 
view, though it found expression in the writings of many others. 
Each declared for a practical, useful type of education for the 




Fig. 123. Michel de 
Montaigne (1533-92) 



402 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

young boy who was to live the life of a gentleman in the world 
of affairs. 

Neither had any sympathy with the colleges and grammar 
schools of the time (R. 214), and both rejected the school for the 
private tutor. This tutor must be selected with great care, and 
first of all must be a well-bred gentleman — a man, as Montaigne 
says, ''who has rather a well-made than a well-filled head" (R. 
215). Locke cautions that "one fit to educate and fonn the 
Mind of a young Gentleman is not every where to be found," and 
of the conunon type of teacher he asks, "When such an one has 
empty'd out into his Pupil all the Latin and Logick he has brought 
from the University, will that Furniture make him a fine Gentle- 
man?" (R.216). 

Both condemn the school training of their time, and both 
urge that the tutor train the judgment and the understand- 
ing rather than the memory. To iinpart good manners rather 
than mere information, and to train for life in the world rather 
than for the life of a scholar, seem to both of fundamental im- 
portance in the education of a boy. "The great world," says 
Montaigne, "is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves. 
In short, I would have this to be the book my young gentleman 
should study with the most attention." "Latin and Learning," 
says Locke, "make all the Noise; and the main Stress is laid upon 
Proficiency in Things a great Part whereof belong not to a Gentle- 
man's CalHng; which is to have the Knowledge of a Man of 
Business, a Carriage suitable to his Rank, and to be eminent and 
useful to his Country, according to his Station" (R. 216). Both 
emphasized the importance of travel abroad as an important 
factor in the education of a gentleman. 

Their place in the history of education. Both Montaigne and 
Locke were concerned alone with the education of the sons of 
gentlemen, individuals now coming rapidly into prominence to 
dispute place in the world of affairs with the higher nobiHty on 
the one hand and the clergy on the other. With the education of 
any other class Montaigne never concerned himself. As for 
Locke, he was later appointed a King's Commissioner, with cer- 
tain oversight of the poor, and for the education of the children of 
such he drew up a careful report which, in true English fashion, 
provided for their training in workhouses and their apprentice- 
ship to a trade (R. 217). He wrote nothing with regard tc the 
education of the children of middle- class workers and tradesmen. 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 403 




Fig. 124. John Locke 
( 1 63 2-1 704) 



Both authors also deal entirely with the work of a tutor, and not 
with the work of a teacher in a school. Neither deals specifically 
with elementary education, but rather with what, in Europe, would 
be called the second ar}-- school period in 
the education of a boy, Locke was exten- 
sively read by the gentry of England, as 
expressive of the best current practice of 
their class, and his ideas as to education 
were also of some influence in shaping the 
instruction of the non-conformist teachers 
in the academies there. His place in the 
history of education is also of some impor- 
tance, as we shall point out later, for the 
disciplinary theory of education which he 
set forth. Still more, Locke later exerted a 
deep influence on the writings of Rousseau 
(chapter xxi), and hence helped materi- 
ally to shape modern educational theory. 

The new schools for the sons of the gentry. Both Montaigne 
and Locke, in their emphasis on the importance of a practical edu- 
cation for the social and political demands of a gentleman con- 
cerned with the affairs of the modern world, represent a still fur- 
ther reaction against the humanistic schools of the time than did 
the humanistic reahsts whom we have just considered. Still 
more, both are expressive of the attitude of the nobiHty and gen- 
tr}^ of the time, who had almost deserted the schools as pedantic 
institutions of httle value. France was then the great country of 
Europe, and French language, French political ideas, French 
manners, and French tutors found their way into all neighboring 
lands. A new social and political ideal was erected — that of the 
pohshed man of the world, who could speak French, had traveled, 
knew history and pohtics, law and geography, heraldry and gene- 
alogy, some mathematics and physics with their applications, 
could use the sword and ride, was adept in games and dancing, 
and was skilled in the practical affairs of life. 

To give such training the French created numerous Academies 
in their cities. A writer of 1649 states that there were twelve such 
institutions at that time in Paris alone. Not infrequently some 
nobleman was at the head. Boys were first educated at home by 
tutors, and then sent to the Academy to be trained in riding, the 
nihtary arts, fortification, mathematics, the modern languages, 



404 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 125. An Academie des Armes 
From an early eighteenth-century Parisian poster, advertising an Academy 

and the many graces of a gentleman. The Englishman, John 
Evelyn, who was in France in 1644, thus describes the French 
Academies : 

At the Palais Cardinal in Paris I frequently went to see them ride 
and exercise the Create Horse, especially at tl e Academy of Monsieur 
du Plessis, and de Veau, whose scholes of that art are frequented by 
the Nobility; and here also young gentlemen are taught to fence, 
daunce, play on musiq, and something in fortifications and mathe- 
matics. 

At Richelieu, near Tours, belongs an Academy where besides the 
exercise of the horse, armes, dauncing, etc., all the sciences are taught 
in the vulgar French by Professors stipendiated by the great Cardinal. 

The Academy of Juilly included some study of physical science, 
mathematics, geography, heraldry, French history, Italian, and Span- 
ish, besides the riding and gentlemanly arts. 

In England the tutor in the home became the type form for the 
education of the sons of a gentleman, the boys frequently being 
sent abroad to complete their education. In German lands, 
which in the seventeenth century were in close sympathy with 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 405 

French life and thought, Heidelberg being a center for the dis- 
semination of French ideas, the French academy idea was cop- 
ied, and what were called Rilterakademieen (knightly academies) 
were founded in the numerous court cities ^ for the education, 
along such Unes, of the sons of the many grades of the German 
nobility. Between 1620 and 1780, before the rise of the German 
nationalistic movement which sought to replace French ideas by 
native German culture, was the great period of these German 
court schools, and during this period they bestowed on the sons of 
the German nobility the courtly and military education of the 
French academies. The education of the nobility was in conse- 
quence segregated from the intellectual life of other classes. 
"Gallants" and ''pedants" were the respective outputs of the 
two types of schools. 

III. SENSE REALISM 

The new educational aims of this group. This represented a 
still further and more important step in advance than either of 
the preceding. In a very direct way sense realism in education 
was an outgrowth of the organizing work of Francis Bacon. Its 
aim was: 

(i) To apply the same inductive method formulated by Bacon for 
the sciences to the work of education, with a view to organizing 
a general method which would greatly simplify the instructional 
process, reduce educational work to an organized system, and in 
consequence effect a great saving of time; and 

replace the instruction in Latin by instruction in the vernacu- 
and to substitute new scientific and social studies, deemed 
greater value for a modern world, for the excessive devotion 
to linguistic studies. 

The sixteenth century had been essentially a period of criticism in 
education, and the leading thinkers on education, as in other lines 
of intellectual activity, were not in the schools. In the seven- 

1 Unlike England and France, the German lands long remained feudal and not 
united. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century Germany was made up 
of more than three hundred little principalities, of which sixty were free cities. Each 
little principality was self-governing and maintained its little court. 
. VRichard Mulcaster (1531-1611), for forty-eight years a famous London Latin 
J ffra.mmar-school master, often classed as a precursor of the sense reahsts, in two 
t/books, published in 1581 and 1582, had urged the great importance of a study of the 
English tongue, and of using it as a medium for instruction. In his Elementarie 
(1582) he had said: "Our own language bears the joyful title of our liberty and free- 
dom, the Latin remembers us of our thralldom and bondage. I love Rome, but 
London better; I favor Italy, but England more. I honor the Latin, but I worship 
the English," (R. 226.) 




406 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

teenth century we come to a new group of men who attempted to 
think out and work out in practice the ideas advanced by the 
critics of the preceding period. In the seventeenth century we 
have, in consequence, the first serious attempt to formulate an 
educational method since the days of the Athenian Greeks and 
the treatise of Quintilian. 

The possibiHty of formulating an educational method that 
would simplify the educational process and save time in in- 
struction, appealed to a number of thinkers, in different lands. 
This group of thinkers, due to their new methods of attack and 
thought, the German historian of education, Karl von Raumer, 
has called Innovators. The chief pedagogical ideas of the Innova- 
tors were: 

1. That education should proceed from the simple to the complex, 
and the concrete to the abstract. 

2. That things should come before rules. 

3. That students should be taught to analyze, rather than to con- 
struct. 

4. That each student should be taught to investigate for himself, 
rather than to accept or depend upon authority. 

5. That only that should be memorized which is clearly understood 
and of real value. 

6. That restraint and coercion should be replaced by interest in the 
studies taught. 

7. That the vernacular should be used as the medium for all instruc- 
tion. 

8. That the study of real things should precede the study of words 
about things. 

9. That the order and course of Nature be discovered, and that a 
method of teaching based on this then be worked out. 

10. That physical education should be introduced for the sake of 
health, and not merely to teach gentlemanly sports. 

11. That all should be provided with the opportunity for an education 
in the elements of knowledge. This to be in the vernacular. 

12. That Latin and Greek be taught only to those likely to complete 
an education, and then through the medium of the mother tongue. 

13. That a uniform and scientific method of instruction could be 

worked out, which would reduce education to a science and serve 
as a guide for teachers everywhere. 

The Englishman, Francis Bacon, whom we have previously con- 
sidered; the German, Wolfgang Ratichius (or Ratke); and the 
Moravian bishop and teacher, Johann Amos Comenius, stand as 
perhaps the clearest examples of this organizing tendency in edu- 
cation. Ratke and Comenius will be considered here as types. 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 407 

Wolfgang Ratke. Bacon had believed that the new scientific 
knowledge should be incorporated into the instruction of the 
schools, and had suggested, in his Advancement of Learning (1603- 
05), a broader course of study for them, and better facihties for 
scientific investigation and teaching. While Bacon was not a 
teacher and did not write specifically on school instruction, his 
writings nevertheless deeply influenced many of those who fol- 
lowed his thinking. 

The first writer to apply Bacon's ideas to education and to 
attempt to evolve a new method and a new course of instruction 
was a German, by the name of Wolfgang Ratke (i 571-1635), 
While studying in England he had read Bacon's Advancement of 
Learning, and from Bacon's suggestions Ratke tried to work out 
a new method of instruction. This he offered, and with much 
secrecy, unsuccessfully for sale at various German courts. Fi- 
nally he issued an "Address " to the princes of Germany, assem- 
bled at an Electoral Diet at Frankfurt-am-Main, in 161 2. In 
this he told them of his new method, which followed Nature, and 
declared that it was "fraught with momentous consequences" 
for mankind. He claimed that he could: 

v[. By using the German language in the earlier years: 
\_^^a) Bring about the use of one common language among the 
German people, and thus lay the basis for unity in govern- 
ment and religion; 
{b) Impart to children a knowledge of the useful arts and 
sciences. 
2. Teach Latin. Greek, and Hebrew better, and in far less time, than 
had previously been required for one language only. 

This method he offered to sell to the princes, and he would impart 
it only on the promise that it be not revealed to others. Two 
professors were appointed to examine Ratke, and they reported 
very favorably on his plan. 

In 161 7 Ratke published, in Leipzig, his Methodus Nova, which 
was the pioneer work on school method, and is Ratke's chief 
claim to mention here. In this he laid down the fundamental 
rules for teaching, as he had thought them cut. They were as 
follows : 

1. The order of Nature was to be sought and followed. 

2. One thing at a time, and that mastered thoroughly. 

3. Much repetition to insure retention. 

4. Use of the mother tongue for all instruction, and the languages 
to be taught through it. 



408 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

5. Everything to be taught without constraint. The teacher to 
teach, and the scholars to keep order and discipline. 

6. No learning by heart. Much questioning and understanding. 

7. Uniformity in books and methods a necessity. 

8. Knowledge of things to precede words about things. 

9. Individual experience and contact and inquiry to replace author- 
ity. 

We see here the essentials of the Baconian ideas, as well as the 
foreshadowings of many other subsequent reforms in teaching 
method. 

During the next half-dozen years Ratke was a much-inter- 
viewed person, as the idea of a more general education of the peo- 
ple, advanced by the Protestant reformers, had appealed strongly 
to the imagination of many of the German princes. Finally the 
necessary money was raised to establish an experimental school,^ 
printing-presses were set up to print the necessary books, the peo- 
ple of the village of Kothen, in Anhalt, were ordered to send their 
children for instruction, and the school opened with Ratke in 
charge and amid great expectations and enthusiasm. A year and 
a half later the school had failed, through the bad management of 
Ratke and his inability to realize the extravagant hopes he had 
aroused, and he himself had been thrown into prison as an im- 
postor by the princes. This ended Ratke's work. He is impor- 
tant chiefly for his pioneer work as the forerunner of the greatest 
educator of the seventeenth century. 

Johann Amos Comenius. We now reach not only the greatest 
representative of sense realism, both in theory and practice, be- 
fore the latter part of the eighteenth century, but also one of the 
commanding figures in the history of education. Comenius was 
born at Nivnitz, in Moravia, in 1592. As a member, pastor, and 
later bishop of the Moravian church, and as a follower of John 
Huss, he suffered greatly in the CathoUc-Protestant warfare 
which raged over his native land during the period of the Thirty 
Years' War. His home twice plundered, his books and manu- 
scripts twice burned, his wife and children murdered, and himself 
at times a fugitive and later an exile, Comenius gave his long Ufe 

^ The school was opened with 433 boys and girls enrolled. It was divided into 
six classes. In the first three German only was used. In the first two classes the 
children were taught to read and write German, Genesis being the reading book of 
the second class. In the third class German grammar was studied. Music, religion, 
and the elements of arithmetic were also taught in these classes. In the fourth 
class Latin was begun, studying Terence, and Latin grammar was worked out from 
the constructions. In the sixth and highest class Greek was taught. A good edu- 
cation was to be given in six years, through the saving of time. 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 409 

to the advancement of the interests of mankind through rehgion 
and learning. Driven from his home and country, he became a 
scholar of the world. 

While a student at the University of Nassau, at the age of 
twenty, he read and was deeply impressed by the "Address " of 
Ratke. Bacon's Novum Organum, which appeared when he was 
twenty-eight, made a still deeper impression upon him. He seems 
to have been familiar also with the writings of the educational re- 
formers of his time in all European lands. He traveled exten- 
sively, and maintained a large correspondence with the scholars of 
his time. He was master of a Latin school in Moravia from the 
age of twenty-two to twenty-four, when he was ordained as a pas- 
tor of the Moravian Church. Eight years later, in 1632, he was 
banished, with all Protestant ministers, from his native land, and 
while an exile for a time took charge of a school at Lissa, in Poland. 
Here he worked out, in practice, the great work on method which 
he later published. In 1638 he was invited to reform the schools 
of Sweden; in 1641 he visited England, in connection with a plan 
for the organization of all knowledge ; he spent the next eight years 
working at school reform in Sweden; from 1650 to 1654 he was in 
charge of a school at Saros-Patak, in Hungary, where he worked 
out his famous textbooks for teaching language; he was consulted 
with reference to the presidency of Harvard College, in 1654; the 
same year he returned to Lissa, and once more lost his books and 
manuscripts and was made a homeless exile ; and finally he found 
a patron and asylum in Amsterdam, where he died in 1671, at the 
age of seventy-nine. The verse beneath his portrait seems an 
especially appropriate commentary on his life. 

Comenius and educational method. While teaching at Lissa, 
in Poland, Comenius had formulated for himself the principles 
underlying school instruction, as he saw it, in a lengthy book 
which he called The Great Didactic} The title page (R. 218) and 
the table of contents (R. 219) will give an idea as to its scope. In 
this work Comenius formulated and explained his two funda- 
mental ideas, namely, that all instruction must be carefully 
graded and arranged to follow the order of nature, and that, in 
imparting knowledge to children, the teacher must make constant 

^ This was written out in his native Czech tongue, but was not published at the 
time. A quarter of a century later it appeared in Latin, with his collected works, 
as published by his patron at Amsterdam (1657). It was then forgotten for two 
centuries. In 1841 the manuscript was found at Lissa, and published in the original 
at Prague, in 1848. The first English edition appeared in i8q6. 



410 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

appeal through sense-perception to the understanding of the 
child. We have here the fundamental ideas of Bacon apphed to 
the school, and Comenius stands as the clearest exponent of sense 
realism in teaching up to his time, and for more than a century 
afterward. 

Deeply religious by nature and training, Comenius held the 
Holy Scriptures to contain the beginning and end of all learning; 
to know God aright he held to be the highest aim ; and with true 
Protestant fervor he contended that the education of every hu- 
man being was a necessity if mankind was to enter into its re- 
ligious inheritance, and piety, virtue, and learning were to be 
brought to their fruition. Unlike those who were enthusiasts 
for religious education only, Comenius saw further, and held an 
ideal of service to the State and Church here below for which 
proper training was needed. Still more, he beUeved in the educa- 
tion of human beings simply because they were human beings, 
and not merely for salvation, as Luther had held. 

Comenius was the first to formulate a practicable school 
method, working along the new lines marked out by Bacon. He 
had no psychology to guide him, and worked largely by analogies 
from nature. A great idea with him was that we should study 
and follow nature, and this led him to the conclusions that educa- 
tion should proceed from the easy to the difficult, the near to the 
remote, the general to the special, and the known to the un- 
known, and that the great business of the teacher was imparting 
and guiding, and not storing the memory. These conclusions 
seem commonplaces to us of to-day, but what is commonplace to- 
day was genius three hundred years ago. To select the subject- 
matter of instruction carefully and on the basis of utility, to elimi- 
nate needless materials, not to attempt too much at a time, to use 
concrete examples, to have frequent repetitions to fix ideas, to ad- 
vance by carefully graded steps, to tie new knowledge to old, to 
learn by observing and doing, and to learn by use rather than 
by precept — were still other of the present-day commonplaces 
which Comenius worked out and formulated in his Didaciica 
Magna} His plea for a mild and gentle discipline in place of the 
brutality of his tmie, his emphasis of the vernacular and the reali- 
ties of life, his conception as to the importance of early education, 
his careful gradation of the school, and his ability to see the use- 

^ See the English edition edited by M. W. KeaLinge, A. and C. Black, London 
i8q6. 




E,y:fum£;M: S : 



r 



i.oe,here a/L C>iiLc \ jvJip t^ Jcruc htJ Q^J ' 
Qlk sliar^Mf fajl:ca £furuuajas^/iury J\£^^ 
(wkoja IcaniuWrJ tdu, ^ fmc fvartli, betfu^ kmnirne 
\Jo aLltfi^- rvorul, makof a.11 me jv^ld kis^fjpw'nc 

Plate io. John Amos Comenius (1592-1671) 

The Moravian Bishop at the age of tifty. (After an engraving by Glover, 
printed as a frontispiece to Hartlib's .4 Reformation oj Schoolcs. London, 1642.) 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 411 

fulness of Latin without over-emphasizing its importance — all 
stamp him as a capable and practical schoolmaster who saw 
deeply into the nature of the educational process. 

Comenius* ideas as to the organization of schools. In his Di- 
dactica Magna Comenius divided the school life of a child into 
four great divisions. The first concerned the period from infancy 
to the age of six, which he called The Mother School. For this 
period he wrote TJie School of Infancy (1628), a book intended 
primarily for parents, and one of such deep insight and funda 
mental importance that parents and teachers may still read it 
with interest and profit. In it he anticipated many of the ideas 
of the kindergarten of to-day. The next division was The Vernac- 
ular School, which covered the period from the ages of six to 
twelve. For this period six classes were to be provided, and the 
emphasis was to be on the mother tongue. This school was to be 
for all, of both sexes, and in it the basis of an education for life 
was to be given. It was to teach its pupils to read and write the 
mother tongue; enough arithmetic for the ordinary business of 
life, and the commonly used measures; to sing, and to know cer- 
tain songs by rote; to know about the real things of life; the Cate- 
chism and the Bible; a general knowledge of history, and espe- 
cially the creation, fall, and redemption of man; the elements of 
geography and astronomy; and a knowledge of the trades and 
occupations of life; all of which, says Comenius, can be taught 
better through the mother tongue than through the medium of 
the Latin and Greek. In scope this school corresponds with the 
vernacular school of modern Europe. 

The next school was The Latin School, covering the years from 
twelve to eighteen, and in this German, Latin, Greek, and He- 
brew were to be taught, by improved methods, and with physics 
and mathematics added. This school he di\aded into six classes, 
named from the principal study in each, as follows: (i) Grammar, 
(2) Physics, (3) Mathematics, (4) Ethics, (5) Dialectics, (6) Rhet- 
oric. He also later outhned a plan for a sLx-class Gymnasium for 
Saros-Patak (R. 220), culminating in a seventh year for prepara- 
tion for the ministry, which was an improvement on the Latin 
School and very modern in character. Had such a school be- 
come common, secondary education in Europe might have been a 
century in advance of where the nineteenth century found it 
The La'in school was to be attended only by those of abihty 
who V ere likely to enter the service of Church or State, or wha 



412 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

intended to pass on to the University. This last was to cover 
the period from eighteen to twenty-four. Unlike all educational 
practice of his time and later, Comenius here provides for an edu- 
cational ladder of the present-day American type, wholly unlike 
the European two- class school system which (p. 353) later evolved. 

Comenius' work in reforming language teaching. At the time 
Comenius lived and wrote, the languages constituted almost the 
only subject of study, and Latin grammar was the great introduc- 
tory subject. The mediaeval grammars (Donatus; Alexander de 
Villa Dei; pp. 156, 155) had been so poor that the instruction was 
difficult and, in consequence, long drawn out. Lily's Latin Gram- 
mar (p. 276), published in 1513, and Melanchthon's Latin Gram- 
mar, pubHshed in 1525, had represented marked advances. Still 
the subject remained difficult, even when taught from these new 
types of grammars. Comenius early became convinced, as a result 
of his teaching and studies in educational method, that the ancient 
classical authors were not only too difficult for boys beginning the 
study of Latin, but that they also did not contain the type of real 
knowledge he felt should be taught in the schools. He accord- 
ingly set to work to construct a series of introductory Latin read- 
ers which would form a graded introduction to the study of Latin, 
and which would also introduce the pupil to the type of world 
knowledge and scientific information he felt should be taught. 

His plan eventually embraced a graded series of five books, as 
follows: 

1. The Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or the World of Sense Objects 
Pictured. This was an illustrated primer and first reader, which ap- 
peared in 1658, and was the first illustrated book ever written for chil- 
dren (R. 221). 

2. The Vesiibulum (Vestibule, or gate). An easy first reader, con- 
sisting of but a few hundred of the most commonly used Latin words 
and sentences, with a translation into the vernacular in parallel col- 
umns. This book required about a half-year for its completion. 

3. The Janua Linguarum Reserata, or Gate of Languages Unlocked. 
This was the first of the series printed (i 631), the Vestibulum being an 
easy introduction to it, and the Orbis Pictus being the Janua simplified 
and illustrated. The Janua contained some eight thousand Latin 
words, arranged in simple sentences, with the vernacular equivalent in 
parallel columns; included information on a variety of subjects; ^ and 

1 The following is illustrative: _ B D 

"Sec. 518 (Geometria). Ex concursu linearum fit angulus qui / 

est vel rectus, quern linea incidens perpendicularis efficit, ut est |/ 

(in subjecto schemate) angulus A C B; vel acutus, minor recto, ^_ , _ 
Ut B C D; vel obtusus, major recto, ut A C D," 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 413 



was a regular Noah's Ark for vocabulary purposes. It embraced 
sufficient reading material and grammar for a year. 

4. The A trium. This was an expansion of the Janua, and treated 
the same topics more in detail. It was intended to be an advanced 
reader, based, as was the Janua, on studies about the real things of life. 
The vocabulary now was Latin-Latin, instead of Latin-vernacular. 

5. The Thesaurus, which was never completed, but was planned to 
be a collection of graded extracts from easy Latin authors — Corne- 
lius Nepos, Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Vergil, Horace, Pliny — to furnish 
the needed reading material for the three upper years of the Latin 
School. 

The textbooks illustrated. Beginning in the Janua, and after- 
wards in the Vestibulum and Orhis Pictus as well, Comenius not 
only simplified the teaching of Latin by producing the best text- 
books for instruction in the subject the world had ever known, 
but he also shifted the whole emphasis in instruction from words 
to things, and made the teaching of scientific knowledge and use- 
ful world information the keynote of his work. The hundred 
different chapters of the Janua, and the hundred and iifty-one 
chapters of the Orbis Pictus, were devoted to imparting informa- 
tion as to all kinds of useful subjects. The following selections 
from the chapter titles of the Orhis Pictus illustrate how large a 
place the new scientific studies occupied in his conception of the 
school : 



The Wodd 

The Heavens 

Fire 

Wind 

Water 

Clouds 

Earth 

Fruits 

Metals 

Trees 

Herbs 

Flowers 



Birds 

Cattle 

Fish 

Parts of Man 

Flesh and Bowels 

Chanels and Bones 

Senses 

Deformities 

Husbandry 

Bees and Honey 

Butchery 

Cookery 



Weaving 


Philosophy 


Tailor 


Prudence 


Barber 


Diligence 


Schoolmaster 


Temperance 


Shoemaker 


Fortitude 


Carpenter 


Humanity 


Potter 


Justice 


Printing 


Consanguinity 


Geometry 


A City 


The Planets 


Merchandizing 


Eclipses 


A Burial 


Europe 


Religious Forms 



The accompanying illustrations (Figs. 126, 127) reveal the nature 
of the text-books he prepared. (See also R. 221 for four ad- 
ditional pages of illustrations from the Orhis Pictus.) 

The success of these textbooks was immediate and very great. 
Within a short time after the publication of the Janua it had been 
translated into Flemish, Bohemian, English, French, German, 
Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish, 
as well as into Arabic, Mongolian, Russian, and Turkish. The 



The Barbers Shop. LXXV. TotJpwa. 




T^f Barber, i. 
?« r^ff Barbers- fliop, 2. 
cutteth off the Uzir 
and the Beard 
vp'ith a pair 0/ Sizzars, 3. 
cr fhaveth with a Razor, 
vphich he taketh out of hii 
Cafe, 4. 

Avd he wajfjeth one 
ever a Bafon, 5. 
with Suds rumitig 
out of a Laver, 6. 
andalfo with Sppe, j* 
andwipeth him 
with a Towel, B, 
combeth him with a Comb, 9. 
md curleth him 
with a Crifping Iron, lo. 

Sometimes he cutteth a Vein 
»/>/; 4 Pen-knife, 11. 
where the Blood fpir Pet h out ^12. 



Tonfor^ r, 
inTonfirinay 2* 
tondec Crines 
& Barbam 
Forcipe, 3. 
vel radit Novaculi, 
quam e Theca, 4. depromlt. 

Ec lavat 
fuper Ft/i;/w, 5, 
Lixivio defluentc 
e CutturniOj 6. 
uc & Sapone^ 7. 
& tergit 
LinteOy 8» 
peftic FeHine^ 9. 
crifpac 
CalamifirOy 10. 

Interdum Venam fecac 
ScalpcUoy II, 
ubi Sanguis propullulat, 12, 



Fig. 126. A Sample Page from the "Orbis Pictus" 

The illustration and Latin text is from the first edition of 1658; the 
English translation from the Enghsh edition of 1727 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 415 

Orbis Pictus was an even greater success.^ It went through many 
editions, in many languages; stood without a competitor in 
Europe for a hundred and fifteen years; and was used as an intro- 
ductory textbook for nearly two hundred years. An Ameri- 
can edition was brought out in New York City, as late as 18 10. 

The Portal to the GaEte oFTt^Sguas. 



Qtiatuor Evangeliftaf ,quiirqiie 

fenfuSife:; profefti die*. 
Septem peclcionesin Oracione 

Dominica« 
Ofto diet /iinc feptimans* 
Ter tria funr norcm- 
Decern preccpca Dei* 
Undccim Apoftoli, dennpto 

Juda. 
Diiodecim Me\ articuli. 
Triginu dies font menfis. 
Centum anni funt feculum. 
Saranis eft mille fraadoin tr- 

tifex. 



FoHrEviftgtliJiitfivefenfesjfi* 

"S«M pttitions in ^bt Lora**]^^^ ^^ 

Zight ettjei *rt a ipn^. i,«nda/riit 

rhrictih'ftarenint. hiiTrc»rff 

TinCommandttHMiofQod^ aameJt'o^ 
iUven ApefiUSijfudMt keihgii' ,heLoi4» 

cepted. Supper 

rwtlve Articles of the faith, ^"ide* 
Thirty dajes art « maneth. ®' 

A hundred jetrs are tn tgn 
Sum it, the forger of < theitftBH 

deceits. 



Fig. 127. Part of a Page from a Latin-English Edition of 

THE "VeSTIBULUM" 

Thousands of parents, who knew nothing of Comenius and cared 
nothing for his educational ideas, bought the book for their chil- 
dren because they found that they liked the pictures and learned 
the language easily from it.^ 

Place and influence of Comenius. Comenius stands in the 
history of education in a position of commanding importance. 
He introduces the whole modern conception of the educational 
process, and outlines many of the modern movements for the im- 
provement of educational procedure. What Petrarch was to the 
revival of learning, what Wycliffe was to reUgious thought, what 
Copernicus was to modern science, and what Bacon and Des- 
cartes were to modern philosophy. Comenius was to educational 
practice and thinking (R. 222). The germ of almost all eight- 
eenth- and nineteenth-century educational theory is to be found 
in his work, and he, more than any one before him and for at least 
two centuries after him, made an earnest effort to introduce the 

^ A very good reprint of the 1727 English edition, with pictures from the first 
edition of 1658, was brought out by C. W. Bardeen, of Syracuse, New York, in 1887. 
This ought to be in all libraries where the history of education is taught. 

^ Basedow's Elementarwerk mil Kupfern (Elementary Reading Book, with copper- 
pfate pictures), published in 1773 (see p. 535), was the first attempt, and not a 
particularly successful one either, to improve on the Orbis Pictus. 



4i6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

new science studies into the school. Far more liberal than his 
Lutheran or Calvinistic or AngHcan or Catholic contemporaries, 
he planned his school for the education of youth in religion and 
learning and to fit them for the needs of a modern world. Unlike 
the textbooks of his time, and for more than a century afterward, 
his were free from either sectarian bigotry or the intense and 
gloomy atmosphere of the age. 

Yet Comenius Hved at an unfortunate period in the history of 
human progress. The early part of the seventeenth century was 
not a time when an enthusiastic and aggressive and liberal- 
minded reformer could expect much of a hearing anywhere in 
western Europe. The shock of the contest into which western 
Christendom had been plunged by the challenge of Luther had 
been felt in every corner of Europe, and the culmination of a cen- 
tury of warfare was then raging, with all the bitterness and brutal- 
ity that a religious motive develops. Christian Europe was too 
filled with an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust and hatred to 
be in any mood to consider reforms for the improvement of the 
education of mankind. As a result the far-reaching changes in 
method formulated by Comenius made but slight impression on 
his contemporaries; his attempt to introduce scientific studies 
awakened suspicion, rather than interest; and the new method 
which he formulated in his Great Didactic was ignored and the 
book itself was forgotten for centuries. His great influence 
on educational progress was through the reform his textbooks 
worked in the teaching of Latin, and the slow infiltration into the 
schools of the scientific ideas they contained. As a result, many 
of the fundamentally sound reforms for which he stood had to be 
worked out anew in the nineteenth century. It is sad to con- 
template how far our western world might have been advanced in 
its educational organization and scientific progress, by the close of 
the eighteenth century, had it been in a mood to receive and util- 
ize the reforms in aims and methods, and to accept the new scien- 
tific subject-matter, proposed and worked out by this far-sighted 
Moravian teacher. Religious bigotry has, in all lands and ages, 
proved itself one of the most serious of all obstacles in the path of 
human progress. 

IV. REALISM AND THE SCHOOLS 

The vernacular schools. The ideas for which the realists just 
described had stood were adopted in the people's schools but 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 417 

slowly, and came only after long waiting. The final incorpora- 
tion of science instruction into elementary education did not come 
until the nineteenth century, and then was an outgrowth of the 
reform work of Pestalozzi on the one hand, and the new social, 
political, economic, and industrial forces of a modern world on the 
other. 

The Peace of Westphaha (1648), which closed a century of bit- 
ter and vindictive religious warfare, was followed by another cen- 
tury of hatred, suspicion, and narrow religious intolerance and 
reaction. All parties now adopted an extremely conservative at- 
titude in matters of religion and education, and the protection of 
orthodoxy became the chief purpose of the school. Reading, re- 
ligion, a little counting and writing, and, in Teutonic lands, music, 
came to constitute the curriculum of such elementary vernacular 
schools as had come to exist, and the religious Primer and the 
Bible became the great school textbooks. The people were poor, 
much of Europe was impoverished and depopulated as a result of 
long-continued reHgious strife, the common people still occupied a 
very low social position, there were as yet no qualified teachers, 
and no need for general education aside from religion. Still more, 
during more than a thousand years the Church had established 
the tradition of providing free education, and when the governing 
authorities of the States which turned to Protestantism had taken 
from the Church both the opportunit}^ to continue the schools 
and the wealth with which to maintain them, they were seldom 
wilHng to tax themselves to set up institutions to continue the 
work formerly done gratis by the Church. In consequence, re- 
gardless of Protestant educational theory as to the need for gen- 
eral education, but little progress in providing vernacular schools 
was made during the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
coxturies. 

Here and there in Teutonic lands, however, the new studies 
found an occasional patron. In 1619 schools were organized for 
the little Duchy of Weimar (p. 317) by a pupil of Ratke, and 
sense realism was given a place in them. The schoolmaster, An- 
dreas Reyher, who in 1642 drew up the Schule Methodus for Duke 
Ernest of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg, was famihar with the 
work of both Ratke and Comenius, and made provision for in- 
struction in ''the natural and useful sciences" (R. 163) for Duke 
Ernest's children. Here and there a few other attempts to pro- 
vide schools and add instruction in the new Realien were made. 



41 8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The number of such attempts was not large, but their work was 
influential, and as a result vernacular schools and science instruc- 
tion finally became established among German-speaking peoples 
\ /before they did in any other land. 

The secondary schools. The influence of Milton's Tractate on 
the non- conformist Academies of England has been traced, and 
the transfer of the idea of instruction in the new mathematical, 
scientific, literary, historical, and political subjects to the new 
American Academies has been mentioned. That these new stud- 
ies also entered into the education of a gentleman in England and 
France, under the private- tutor and the courtly- academy system, 
and were copied from the French and constituted a large part of 
the instruction organized for the Ritterakademieen of the numer- 
ous court cities in German lands, has also been mentioned. In 
both England and France such private instruction exerted but 
little influence on the existing Latin grammar schools, and in 
consequence the schools of both countries remained largely un- 
changed in direction and purpose until the second half of the nine- 
teenth century. In German lands the Ritterakademieen idea 
experienced a further development, which proved to be of large 
Importance for the future of German education. 

Francke's "Institutions." With the introduction of French 
ideas and training into the German courts, French skepticism 
in matters of rel'gion developed in the court circles. Under the 
influence of a pious Lutheran clergyman, Philip Spener (1635- 
1705), who tried to emphasize religion as an affair of the heart 
rather than the head; and especially as a result of the work of his 
spiritual successor, Augustus Hermann Francke, a movement 
s,rose in German lands, during the closing years of the seven- 
teenth century, which became known as Pietism} Disgusted 
with the lifeless and insincere religion of the time, these two 
strove to substitute a rehgion of both head and heart. In 
1695, moved by pity for the poor, Francke estabhshed at Halle 
the first of his famous ''Institutions," — a school for poor chil- 
dren. A pay school for the well-to-do was soon added, and soon 
another school for the children of nobility. An orphan school also 
was in time provided. The school for the poor developed into a 
vernacular or Burgher {volks; peoples) school; the school for the 
pay pupils into a Latin School, or Gymnasium; and the school for 

1 This term was at first applied in derision, just as Methodism was applied to the 
English religious reformers in the eighteenth century, but the term wa^j soon made 
reputable by the earnestness and ability of those who accepted it. 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 419 




nobles into a higher scientific school, or Padagogium as it was 
called. At first Francke encountered some theological opposition, 
but the "Institutions" prospered, and at the time of his death 
contained over 2200 pupils, and over 300 teachers, workers, and 
attendants. 

The interesting thing about Francke's work was the courses of 
instruction he provided for his schools.^ In the Burgher School 
he gave the children instruction in 
history, geography, and animal life, 
in addition to the reading, writing, 
counting, music, and religion of the 
isual German^ vernacular school. Into 
the Gynmasium he introduced instruc- 
tion in history, geography, music, sci- 
ence, and mathematics, in addition to 
the usual Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. 
He also changed the purpose of the 
language instruction. Greek was stud- 
ied to be able to read the New Tes- 
tament in the original, and Hebrew 
better to understand the Old. The 
Padagogium was provided with a bo- 
tanical garden, a cabinet of natural 
history, physical apparatus, a laboratory for the study of chem- 
istry and anatomy, and a workshop for turning and glass cutting. 
Independent of the work of Comenius, but as an outgrowth of 
the new movement for the study of science now beginning to 
influence educational thought, we have here the most important 
attempt at the introduction into the school of sense realism, or 
Realien, as the Germans say, that the modern world had so far 
witnessed. In 1697 Francke added a. Seminar ium PrcEceptorium, 
to train teachers in his new ideas. This was the first teachers' 
training-school in German lands, and the teachers he trained 
served to scatter his educational ideas over the German States.- 

1 Francke's father had been counselor to Duke Ernest of Gotha, who had created 
for his little duchy the most modern-type school system of the seventeenth century. 
How much Francke's progressive ideas in educational matters go back to the work 
of Duke Ernest forms an interesting speculation. 

2 "Francke had the rare ability to see clearly what needed doing, and then to do 
it regardless of obstacles or consequences. The magnitude of his work in Halle is 
simply marvelous, and yet what he actually accomplished is insignificant in com- 
parison with what he inspired others to do. He showed how practical Christianity 
could be incorporated in the work of the common schools; his plan was immediately 
adopted by P'rederick William I and made well-nigh universal in Prussia. He 



\^.c^ 



Fig. 128. Augustus 

Hermann Francke 

(1663-1727) 



420 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The first Realschule. Associated with Francke as a teacher 
was one Christopher Semler (i 669-1 740), who became deeply in- 
terested in the new studies of the secondary school. In 1706 
Semler had submitted a plan to the government of Magdeburg 
for the teaching of the practical studies. This was referred to the 
Berlin Society of Sciences, which approved the plan, and later 
elected Semler to membership in the Society. For years Semler . 
continued as a teacher at Halle, but without carrying the idea far 
enough to create a new type of school. In 1739 Semler pubhshed 
a paper "Upon the Mathematical, Mechanical, and Agricultural 
Real School in the City of Halle," in which he described the in- 
struction given there. This was probably the first use of the term 
''real school" {Realschule). The important subjects described as 
taught, aside from religion, were "the useful and in daily life 
wholly indispensable sciences," such as mathematics, drawing, 
geography, history, natural history, agriculture, and economics, 
with much emphasis on observation by the pupils. 

The work at Halle soon stimulated complaints as to the existing 
Latin schools, where children, destined for business or the service 
of the State, were kept trying to learn Latin, "to the neglect of 
more practical and more useful studies." The usefulness of the 
new real studies now began to be more correctly estimated, and 
the conviction gradually grew that those boys who were destined 
for trade — now a rapidly increasing number — should not be 
obliged to follow the same course as those destined to be scholars. 
In 1720 Rector Gesner, of the gymnasium at Rotenburg, wrote, 
rather sarcastically : 

The one class, who will not study, but will become tradesmen, mer- 
chants, or soldiers, must be instructed in writing, arithmetic, writing 
letters, geography, description of the world, and history. The other 
class may be trained for studying. 

In 1742 the Rector at Dresden, Schottgen, issued a "Humble 
proposal for the special class in public city schools" to provide for 
those children "who are to remain without (that is, cannot learn) 
Latin." Instead of forcing them to attempt to learn Donatus, 
which he said was useless for them, he urged that a special class 
(school) be organized to train them to become useful merchants, 

showed how the Realien could be profitably employed in a Latin school, and even 
made a constituent part of a university preparatory course; as a result of his methods, 
and especially of his suggestion that schools should be founded for the exclusive 
purpose of fitting the youth of the citizen class for practical life, there has since 
grown up in Germany a class of iieaZ-schools." (Russell, J. E., German Higher 
Schools, p. 64.) 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 421 

artists, and mechanics. In 1751 Rector Henzky, of Prenzlau, 
issued a treatise to show "That Real schools can and must be- 
come common." In 1756 Gesner, professor at the new Univer- 
sity of Gottingen, in a pamphlet ''On the organization of a gym- 
nasium" (R. 223), urged that there were three classes of youths 
for whom schools should be provided, one of which needed the 
Realschtde. 

In 1747 a clergyman by the name of Julius Hecker (i 707-1 768), 
who had been a pupil in, and later had taught in Francke's "In- 
stitutions," went to Berlin and opened there the first distinct 
German Realschtde. In this school Hecker provided instruction 
in religion, ethics, German, French, Latin, mathematics, drawing, 
history, geography, mechanics, architecture, and a knowledge of 
nature and of the human body. Classes were organized in archi- 
tecture, agriculture, bookkeeping, manufacturing, and mining. 
The school prospered from the first, and in time became the 
"Royal Realschule" of Berlin, In answer to a growing demand 
for advanced education for that constantly increasing number of 
youths destined for the trades or a mercantile career, the real- 
schule idea was copied in a number of the important cities of Ger- 
many. Thus early — • a century in advance of other nations, and 
a century and a quarter ahead of the United States — • did Prussia 
lay the foundations of that scientific and technical education 
which, later on, did so much toward creating modern industrial 
Germany. 

The universities and the new scientific learning. Though the 
theological persecution of scientific workers largely died out after 
about the middle of the seventeenth century, and was never 
much of a factor in lands which had embraced some form of 
Protestantism, the new sciences nevertheless made but little head- 
way in the universities until after the beginning of the eighteenth 
century. Up to the close of the seventeenth century the universi- 
ties in all lands continued to be dominated by their theological 
faculties, and instruction still remained largely encompassed by 
mediasvalism. England represents perhaps the most notable ex- 
ception to this statement, scientific studies ha\dng been received 
with greater tolerance by the universities there than in other 
lands. In both CathoHc and Protestant lands the need was felt 
for orthodox training, through fear of further heresy, and many 
petty restrictions were thrown about study and teaching which 
were stifling to free thinking and investigation. Each Httle King- 



422 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

dom or State now took over the supervision of some old university 
within its borders, or established a new one, that it might more 
completely control orthodoxy and prepare its own civil servants. 
Of the seventeenth century, Paulsen ^ well says: 

It was essentially the period of the territorial-confessional university, 
and is characterized by a preponderance of theological-confessional 
interest. . . . Many new foundations, both Catholic and Protestant, 
now appeared. The chief impetus leading to these numerous founda- 
tions was the accentuation of the principle of territorial sovereignty, 
from the ecclesiastical as well as the political point of view. The con- 
sequence was that the universities began to be instrumentia denom- 
inationis of the government as professional schools for its ecclesiasti- 
cal and secular officials. Each individual government endeavored to 
secure its own university in order — (i) to make sure of wholesome 
instruction, which meant, of course, instruction in harmony with the 
confessional standards of its established church; (2) to retain training 
of its secular officials in its own hands; and finally (3) render attend- 
ance at foreign universities unnecessary on the part of its subjects, and 
thus keep the money in the country. 

Large amounts of money were not needed to establish a new univer- 
sity. A few thousand guilders or thalers sufficed for the salaries of 
ten or fifteen professors, a couple of preachers and physicians would 
undertake the theological and medical lectures, and some old monas- 
tery would supply the needed buildings. 

After the Reformation the law faculty increased to the place of 
first importance in Protestant lands, because the Reformation 
had created a new demand for judges and higher court officials to 
replace the rule of the clergy. The medical faculty continued to 
be, as in the mediaeval universities, the smallest of all the faculties 
and amounted to httle before the nineteenth century.^ The arts 
faculty, or philosophical as it came to be termed in German lands, 
offered lectures in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a general course 
in philosophy, but the Aristotelian texts and to some extent medi- 
aeval methods in instruction continued to be used until the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century. 

Here and there some professor "read" on mathematics, and in 
Protestant lands on the new astronomy, and the study of botany 
began as the study of herbs in the medical faculty,^ but during 

1 Paulsen, Fr., The German Universities, p. 36. 

2 As late as 1805, according to Paulsen, of the whole number of students in the 
universities of Prussia, there were but 144 in the combined medical faculties, as 
against 555 in theology, and 1036 in law. 

^ Francke relates that, as a student at Erfurt (c. 1675), he was able to study 
physics and botany, along with his theological studies. Oxford records show the 
publication of a list of plants in the "Physick Garden" there as early as 1648. The 
garden was endowed about that time by the Earl of Danby, and in 1764 lectures on 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 423 

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries few professors or students 
were interested in the scientific subjects. By 1675 Bacon's N^o- 
vum Organum had begun to be taught at both Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, and by 1700 the Newtonian physics had begun to displace 
Aristotle at Oxford. By 1740 it was well established there. At 
first instruction in the new subjects was offered as an extra and 
for a fee by men not having professional rank (R. 224), and later 
the instruction was given full recognition by the university. By 
1700 Cambridge had become a center for mathematical study (R. 
225), and with the growth in popularity of the Newtonian philoso- 
phy, mathematical studies there took the place held by logic in 
the mediasval university. Cambridge has ever since remained a 
center for mathematical and, since the beginning of the nine- 
teenth centur}^, for scientific studies as well. Between 1680 
and 1700 the University of Paris was reformed, and the mathe- 
matical and philosophical studies of Descartes (p. 394) began 
to be taught there. The universities of the Netherlands began 
to teach the new mathematical and scientific studies even 
earlier. 

Aside from the above described Realschule development, the 
new scientific movement for a time largely passed over German 
lands, and in consequence the German universities remained unre- 
formed until the eighteenth century. During the seventeenth 
century they sank to their lowest intellectual level. In 1694, 
largely in protest against the narrowness of the old universities, 
the new University of Halle was founded. It received into its 
faculty certain forward-looking men who had been driven from 
the old universities,^ and is generally considered as the first mod- 
ern university. The new scientific and mathematical subjects 
and a reformed philosophy were introduced; the instruction in 
Greek and Latin was reformed; German was made the medium of 
classroom instruction; and a scientific magazine in German was 
begun. In 1737 the University of Gottingen became a second 
center of modern influence, and from these two institutions the 
new scientific spirit gradually spread to all the Protestant univer- 

botany were begun there. Lord Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning (1605), had 
written: "We see hkewise that some places instituted for physic (medicinas) have 
annexed the commodity of gardens for simples of all sorts, and do likewise command 
the use of dead bodies for anatomies." 

' Thomasius was made professor of theology, and Francke professor of Greek 
and Oriental languages. Both had been expelled from the University of Leipzig. 
Christian Wolfif, who had been banished by Frederick William I, was recalled and 
made professor of philosophy. It was he who "made philosophy talk German." 



424 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

sities of German lands. A century later they were the leading 
universities of the world. 

The transition now practically complete. From the time Pe- 
trarch made his first "find" at Liege (1333), in the form of two 
previously unknown orations of Cicero (p. 244), to the pubhca- 
tion of the Principia (p. 388) of Newton (1687), is a period of ap- 
proximately three and a half centuries. During these three and a 
half centuries a complete transformation of world-hfe had been 
effected, and the mediaeval man, with his eyes on the past, had 
given place to the modern man with his eyes on the future. Dur- 
ing these three and a half centuries revolutionary forces had been 
at work in the world of ideas, and the transition from mediaeval 
to modern attitudes had been accomplished. From 1333 to 1433 
was the century of "literary finds," and during this period the 
monastic treasures were brought to light and edited and the 
classical literature of Rome restored. Greek also was restored to 
the western world, and a reformed Latin, Greek, and Hebrew 
were given the place of first importance in the new humanistic 
school. The invention of printing took place in 1423; 1456 wit- 
nessed the appearance of the first printed book, and the perfection 
of the new means for the multiplication of books and the dissemi- 
nation of ideas. Before 1500 the great era of geographical dis- 
covery had been inaugurated; a sea-route to India was found in 
1487; and a new continent in 1492. In 1519-22 Magellan's ships 
rounded the world. 

In 1 5 17 Luther issued the challenge, the shock of which was 
felt in every corner of Christian Europe, and within a half-century 
much of northern and western Europe had been lost to the origi- 
nal Roman Church. Soon independence in thinking had been 
extended to the problem of the organization of the universe, and 
in 1 543 Copernicus issued the book that clearly marks the begin- 
ning of modern scientific thinking and inquiry. Bacon had done 
his organizing work by 1620, and Newton's Principia (1687) fi- 
nally established modern scientific thought and work. Comenius 
died in 167 1, his great organizing work done, and his textbooks, 
with their many new educational ideas, in use all over Europe. 
The mediaeval attitude still continued in religion and govern- 
ment, but the world as a whole had left mediaeval attitudes be- 
hind it, and was facing the future of modern world organization 
and life. To the educational organization of this modern world 
we now turn, though before doing so we shall try to present a 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 425 

cross-section, as it were, of the development in educational theory 
and practice which had been attained by about the middle of the 
eighteenth century. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Explain why the scholars of the time were so intent on producing a new 
race of Roman youths for a revived Latin scholarly world. 

2. Show that a reaction against humanism was certain to arise, and why. 

3. How do you explain the very small influence exerted on the Latin gram- 
mar schools of England by the non-conformist Academies, after they had 
been absorbed into the existing English non-state system of higher 
schools? 

4. Compare Milton and Montaigne. 

5. What would be the most probable effect "on education of the erection of 
the poHshed-man-of-the- world ideal? 

6. Enumerate the forces favoring and opposing the change of the language 
of instruction from Latin to the vernacular. 

7. How many of the thirteen principles of the Innovators do we still hold 
to be vahd? 

8. Just what was new in the nine fundamental rules laid down by Ratke, 
in his Met hod us Nova? 

g. What is your estimate of the vernacular schools as outlined by Comenius? 
Of the plans for a gymnasium at Saros-Patak? 

10. Compare Comenius' Latin school with the College of Calvin (p. 330). 

11. State the new ideas in instruction embodied in the textbooks of 
Comenius. 

12. Show that Comenius dominates modern educational ideas, even though 
his work was largely lost, in the same way that Petrarch or Wycliffe or 
Copernicus do modern work in their fields. 

13. Explain the very slow development of vernacular schools after the 
Protestant Revolts. 

14. Why would the introduction of real studies into them be especially slow? 

15. What explanation can you offer for the much earlier beginnings in scien- 
tific instruction in German lands than in England or America, when 
much more of the important early scientific work was done by English- 
men than by Germans? and the failure of science for a time to find a 
home in the German universities? 

16. Explain the continued dominance of the theological faculty in the uni- 
versities of the seventeenth century. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following illustrative selections 
are reproduced: 

210. Rabelais: On the Nature of Education. 

211. Milton: The Aim and Purpose of Education. 

212. Milton: His Program for Study. 

213. Adamson: Discontent of the Nobility with the Schools. 

214. Montaigne: Ridicule of the Humanistic Pedants. 

215. Montaigne: His Conception of Education. 

216. Locke: Extracts from his Thoughts on Education. 

217. Locke: Plan for Working Schools for Poor Children. 

218. Comenius: Ti tie-Page of the Greai Didactic. 



426 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

219. Comenius: Contents of the Grcal Didactic. 

220. Comenius: Plan for the (lymnasium at Saros-Patak. 

221. Comenius: Sample pages from the Orhis P id lis. 

(a) A page from a Latin-German edition of 1740. 
{b) Two pages from a Latin-English edition of 1727. 
(c) A page from the New York edition of 1810. 

222. Butler: Place of Comenius in the History of Education. 

223. Gesner: Need for Realschulen for the New Classes to be Educated. 

224. Handbill: How the Scientific Studies began at Cambridge. 

225. Green: Cambridge Scheme of Study of 1707. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Show that Rabelais (210) was in close sympathy with the best of the new 
humanists of his age. 

2. Would Milton's definition of the purpose of education (211) be true, 
still? 

3. Show from Milton's program of studies (212) that he represents a transi- 
tion type, and also that his program contains the nucleus of the more 
modern studies of the secondary school. 

4. Explain the discontent of the nobility (213) with the existing Church 
schools. 

5. Assuming Montaigne's description of the education of his time (214) to 
be true, explain why this might naturally be the case. 

6. Just what kind of an education does Montaigne outline (215), and how 
great a reaction was this from existing conditions? 

7. In how far would Locke's ideas (216) still apply to the education of a 
boy of the leisure class? 

8. Show that Locke's plan for work-house schools (217) was in thorough 
accord with English post-Reformation ideas as to the duty of the State 
in matters of education, and also that it contained the beginnings of the 
pauper-school idea of education which we later had to combat. 

9. From the title-page (218) and the table of contents (219) of Comenius' 
Great Didactic, point out the originality and novelty of his ideas. 

10. Compare Comenius' plan for the Saros-Patak Gymnasium (220) with 

such schools as Sturm's (137), the college of Guyenne (136), the college 

of Calvin (175), and the Jesuits (p. 340). 
ir. Compare Comenius' plan (220) with the instruction in an American 

high school of seventy-five years ago. 
.2. Compare the Alphabet page of Comenius' Orhis Pictus (221) with the 

same page in the New England Primer (202). 

13. When so many educational reforms were inaugurated so early by Co- 
menius (222), explain their neglect, and our having to work them out 
anew in the nineteenth century. 

14. What does the need for Realschulen (223) indicate as to the evolution 
of German society and the recuperation from the ravages of war? 

15. Compare the beginnings of scientific study at Cambridge (224) with 
beginnings of new subjects to-day in our schools. 

16. Just what does the Cambridge Scheme of Study (225) indicate as being 
taught there? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Adamson, J. W. Pioneers of Modern Education, 1600-1700. 
Barnard, Henry. German Teachers and Educators. 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS 427 

*Butler, N. M. "The Place of Comenius in the History of Education"; 
in Proc. N. E. A., 1892, pp. 723-28. 
Browning, Oscar, Editor. Millon's Tractate on Education. 
*Comenius, J. A. Orbis Pictiis (Bardeen; Syracuse). 
Hanus, Paul H. "The Permanent Influence of Comenius"; in Educa 

tional Review, vol. 3, pp. 226-36 (March, 1892). 
Laurie, S. S. History of Educational Opinion since the Renaissance. 
*Laurie, S. S. John Amos Comenius. 

Quick, R. H., Editor. Locke's Thoughts on Education. 
*Quick, R. H. Essays on Educational Reformers. 

*Vostrovsky, Clara. "A European School of the Time of Comenius 
(Prague, 1609) "; in Education, vol. 17, pp. 356-60 (February, 1897.) 
Wordsworth, Christopher. Scholce Academicce; Studies at the English 
Universities in the Eighteenth Century. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THEORY AND PRACTICE BY THE MIDDLE OF THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

We have now reached, in our history of the transition age which 
began with the Revival of Learning — the great events of which 
were the recovery of the ancient learning, the rediscovery of the 
historic past, the reawakening of scholarship, and the rise of re- 
ligious and scientific inquiry — the end of the transition period, 
and we are now ready to pass to a study of the development and 
progress of education in modern times. Before doing so, however, 
we desire to gather up and state the progress in both educational 
theory and practice which had been attained by the end of this 
transition period, and to present, as it were, a cross-section of 
education at about the middle of the eighteenth century. To do 
this, then, before passing to a consideration of educational develop- 
ment in modern times, will be the purpose of this chapter. We 
shall first review the progress made in evolving a theory as to the 
educational purpose, and then present a cross-section view of the 
schools of the time under consideration. 

I. PRE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL THEORIES 

The state purpose of the Greeks and Romans. As we saw, 
early in our study of the rise and progress of the education of peo- 
ples, the City-States of Greece were the first consciously to evolve 
a systematic plan of schooling and a prolonged course of training 
for those who were to guide and direct the State. In Sparta 
the training was almost wholly for military efficiency and tribal 
safety, but in Athens we found a people using a well-worked-out 
system of training to develop individual initiative, advance civi- 
lization, and promote the welfare of the State. The education 
provided was for but a class, to be sure, and a small ruling class at 
that, but it was the first evidence of the new western, individualis- 
tic, and democratic spirit expressing itself in the education of the 
young. There also we found, for the first time, the thinkers of 
the State deeply concerned with the education of the youth of the 
State, and viewing education as a necessity to make life worth 
living and to secure the State from dangers, both without and 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 429 

within. The training there given produced wonderful results, 
and for two centuries the men educated by it ably guided the des- 
tinies of Athens. 

The essentials of this Greek training were later embodied in the 
private-adventure school system that arose in Rome, which was 
adapted to conditions and needs there, and which was used for the 
training of a few Roman youths of the wealthier famiUes for a po- 
litical career. Schooling at Rome, though, never attained the im- 
portance or rendered the service that characterized education at 
Athens, and never became an instrument of the State used con- 
sciously for State ends. One Roman writer, Quintilian, as we 
have seen (R. 25), worked out a careful statement of the whole 
process of educating a youth for a pubhc career, and this, the first 
practical treatise on education, was for long highly prized as the 
best-written statement of the educational art. 

The future-life conception of the Christians. With the decline 
of Roman power and influence, and the victory of Christianity 
throughout the Roman world, the State conception of education 
was entirely lost to western Europe, and more than a thousand 
years elapsed before it again arose in the western world. The 
Church now became the State, and the need for any education for 
secular life almost entirely passed away. For centuries the aim 
was almost entirely a preparation for life in the world to come. 
Throughout all the early Middle Ages this attitude continued, 
supplemented only by the meager education of a few to carry on 
the work of the Church here below. 

After the tenth century we noted the rise of some more or 
less independent study in some of the monastery and cathedral 
schools, and after the twelfth century the rise of studia generalia 
marked the congregation into groups of the few interested in a 
studious life. These in turn gave rise to the university founda- 
tions, and to the beginning of independent and secular study once 
more in the western world. The Revival of Learning, the recov- 
ery of the ancient manuscripts, the revival of the study of Greek 
in the West, the founding of Ubraries, the invention of paper and 
printing, and the revival of trade and commerce — all were new 
forces tending to give a new direction to scholarly study, and as a 
result a new race of scholars, more or less independent of the 
Church, now arose in western Europe. They were, however, a 
class, and a very small class at that, and though the result of 
their work was the creation of a new humanistic secondary school, 



430 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

this still ministered to the needs of but a few This few was in 
tended either for the service of the Church, for the governmental 
service of the towns which had by this time attained their inde- 
pendence, or for the governments of the rising principalities or 
states. 

For the great mass of the people, whose purpose in life was to 
work and believe and obey, agriculture, warfare, the rising trades 
with their guilds (p. 209), and the services of the Church (p. 121) 
constituted almost all in the way of education which they ever re- 
ceived. To be useful to his overlord and master here and to be 
saved hereafter were the chief life-purposes of the common man. 
The former he must himself undertake in order to be able to live 
Xt all; the latter the Church undertook to supply to those who 
followed her teachings. 

The rise of the vernacular religious school. For the first time 
in history, if we except the schools of the early Christian period, 
the Protestant Revolts created a demand for some form of an ele- 
mentary religious school for all. The Protestant theory as to per- 
sonal versus collective salvation involved as a consequence the 
idea of the education of all in the essentials of the Christian faith 
and doctrine. The aim was the same as before — personal salva- 
tion — but the method was now changed from that of the Church 
as intermediary to personal knowledge and faith and eiTort. To 
be saved, one must know something of the Word of God, and this 
necessitated instruction. To this end, in theory at least, schools 
had to be established to educate the young for membership in the 
new type of Church relationship. Reading the vernacular^a little 
counting and writing, in Teutonic countries a little m.usic, and 
careful instruction in a religious Primer (R. 202), the Catechism, 
and the Bible, now came to constitute the subject matter of a new 
vernacular school for the children of Protestants, and to a certain 
extent in time for the children of Catholics as well. As we 
pointed out earlier (p. 353), between this new type of school for 
religious ends and the older Latin grammar school for scholarly 
purposes there was ahnost no relationship, and the two developed 
wholly independently of one another. In the Latin grammar 
schools one studied to become a scholar and a leader in the politi- 
cal or ecclesiastical world; in the vernacular religious school one 
learned to read that he might be able to read the Catechism and 
die Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There 
was scarcely any other purpose to the maintenance of the ele- 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 431 



mentary vernacular schools. This condition continued until well 
into the eighteenth century. 

Early unsuccessful educational reformers. Back in the seven- 
teenth century, as we have pointed out in the preceding chapter, 
a very earnest effort was made by Ratke and Comenius to intro- 
duce a larger conception of the educational process into the ele- 




FiG. 1 29. A French School before the Revolution 

(After an etching by Boisseau, 1 730-1809) 

nientary vernacular school, to eliminate the gloomy religious ma- 
terial from the textbooks, to substitute a human-welfare purpose 
for the exclusively life-beyond view, and to transform the school 
into an institution for imparting both learning and religion. Co 
menius in particular hoped to make of the new elementary reli 
gious school a potent instrument for human progress by introduc- 
ing new subject-matter, and by formulating laws and developing 
methods for its work which would be in harmony with the new 
scientific procedure so well stated by Francis Bacon. Comenius 
stands as the commanding figure in seventeenth-century peda- 
gogical thought. He reasoned out and introduced us to the whole 
modern conception of the educational process and purpose (p. 
415), and gave to the school of the people a solid theoretical and 
practical basis. Living, though, at an unfortunate period in hu- 
man history, he was able to awaken little interest either in ra- 




432 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tional teaching-method or in reforms looking to the advancement 
of the welfare of mankind. Instead he roused suspicion and dis- 
trust by the innovations and progressive reforms he proposed ; his 
now-celebrated book on teaching method (Rs. 218, 219) was not 
at the time understood and was for long forgotten, while the 
fundamentally sound ideas and pedagogical reforms which he 
proposed and introduced were lost amid the hatreds of his time, 
and had to be worked out again and reestablished in a later and a 
more tolerant age. 

Another unsuccessful reformer of some importance, and one 
whose work antedated that of both Ratke and Comenius, was 
the London_^choolmaster, Richard Mulcaster (1531-1611), for 
twenty-five years headmaster of the famous Merchant Taylors' 
School (p. 278), and later Master of Saint Paul's School (p. 275). 
In 1 581 he issued his Positions, a pedagogical work so far in ad- 
vance of his time, and written in such a heavy and affected style, 
that it passed almost unnoticed in England, and did not become 
known at all in other lands. Yet the things he stood for became 
the fundamental ideas of nineteenth-century educational thought. 
These were: 

1. That the end and aim of education is to develop the body and the 
faculties of the mind, and to help nature to perfection. 

2. That all teaching processes should be adapted to the pupil taught, 

3. That the first stage in learning is of large importance, and re- 
quires high skill on the part of the teacher. 

4. That the thing to be learned is of less importance than the pupil 
learning. 

5. That proper brain development demands that pressure and one- 
sided education alike be avoided. 

6^That the mother tongue should be taught first and well, and 
/ -'' should be the langUageoT the school from six to twelve. 

7. That music and drawing should be taught. 

8. That reading and writing at least should be the common right of 
all, and that girls should be given equal opportunity with boys. 

9. That training colleges for teachers should be established and 
maintained. 

The modern nature of many of Mulcaster's proposals may be seen 
from the table of contents of his volume (R. 226). Mulcaster, 
like Comenius, thought far in advance of his age, and in conse- 
quence his book was soon and for long forgotten. Yet what 
Quick ^ says of him is very true : 

^ Quick, R. H, Essays on Educational Reformers, 2d ed., p. 97. 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 433 

It would have been a vast gain to all Europe if Mulcaster had been 
followed instead of Sturm^^^^e was one of the earliest advocates of the 
use of the vernacular instead of Latin, and good reading and \mting 
in English wefeToT5e secured before Latin was begun. His elementary 
course included five things: English reading, English writing, drawing, 
singing, playing a musical instrument. If this were made to occupy 
the school time up to twelve, Mulcaster held that more would be done 
between twelve and sixteen than between seven and seventeen in the 
ordinary (Latin grammar school) way. There would be a further gain 
in that the children would not be set against learning. 

John Locke, and the disciplinary theory of education. An- 
other commanding figure in seventeenth-century pedagogical 
thought was the English scholar, philosopher, teacher, physician, 
and poKtical writer, John Locke (163 2-1 704). In the preceding 
chapter we pointed out the place of Locke as a wTiteron the edu- 
cation of the sons of the English gentry, and illustrated by an ex- 
tract from his Thoughts (R. 216) the importance he placed on such 
a practical type of education as would prepare a gentleman's son 
for the social and political demands of a world fast becoming 
modern. Locke's place in the history of education, though, is of 
much more importance than was there (p. 402) indicated. Locke 
was essentially the founder of modern psychology, based on the 
application of the micthods of modern scientific investigation to a 
study of the mind,^ and he is also of importance in the history 
of educational thought as ha\ang set forth, at some length and 
with much detail, the disciplinary conception of the educational 
process. 

Locke had served as a tutor in an English nobleman's family, 
had worked out his educational theories in practice and thought 
them through as mind processes, and had become thoroughly con- 
vinced that it was the process of learning that was important, 
rather than the thing learned. Education to him was a process 
of disciplining the body, fixing good habits, training the youth in 
moral situations, and training the mind through work with stud- 

1 Locke was the first to lay the basis for modem scientific psychology to supersede 
the philosophic psychology of Plato and Aristotle. In his Essay on the Conduct of 
the Human Understanding (1690) upon which he spent many years of labor, he first 
applied the methods of scientific observation to the mind, analyzed experiences, and 
employed introspection and comparative mental study. He thus built up a psychol- 
ogy based on the analysis of experiences, and came to the conclusion that our knowl- 
edge is derived by reflection on experience coming through sensation. He is conse- 
quently called the founder of empirical psychology, and the forerunner of modern 
experimental psychology and child study. His philosophy, and his theory of educa- 
tion as well, thus came to be a philosophy of experience — a rejection of mere 
authority, and a constant appeal to reason as a guide. 



434 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ies selected because of their disciplinary value. This conception 
of education he sets forth well in the following paragraph, taken 
from his Thoughts: 

The great Work of the Governor is to fashion the Carriage and form 
the Mind; to settle in his Pupils good Habits and the Principles oi 
Virtue and Wisdom ; to give him by little and little a View of Mankind, 
and work him into a Love and Imitation of what is excellent and praise- 
worthy; and in the Prosecution of it, to give him Vigor, Activity, and 
Industry. The Studies which he sets him upon, are but as it were the 
Exercise of his Faculties, and Employment of his Time, to keep him 
from Sauntering and Idleness, to teach him Application, and accustom 
him to take Pains, and to give him some little Taste of what his own 
Industry must perfect (§ 94). 

In his Thoughts Locke first sets forth at length the necessity for 
disciplining the body by means of diet, exercise, and the harden- 
ing process. "A sound mind in a sound body " he conceives to be 
" a short but full description of a happy state in this world," and a 
fundamental basis for morality and learning. The formation of 
good habits and manners through proper training, and the proper 
adjustment of punishments and rewards next occupies his atten- 
tion, and he then explains his theory as to making all punishments 
the natural consequences of acts. Similarly the mind, as the 
body, must be disciplined to virtue by training the child to deny, 
subordinate desires, and apply reason to acts. The formation of 
good habits and the disciplining of the desires Locke regards as 
the foundations of virtue. On this point he says: 

As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure 
Hardship, so also does that of the Mind. And the great Principle and 
Foundation of all Virtue and Worth is plac'd in this : — That a Man is 
able to deny himself his own Desires, cross his own Inclinations, and 
purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho' the Appetite lean the 
other Way (§ t,^). 

Similarly, in intellectual education, good thinking and the em- 
ployment of reason is the aim, and these, too, must be attained 
through the proper disciphne of the mind. Good intellectual edu- 
cation does not consist merely in studying and learning, he con- 
tends, as was the common practice in the grammar schools of his 
time, but mu^t be achieved by a proper drilling of the powers of 
the mind through the use of selected studies. The purpose of 
education, he holds, is above all else to make man a reasoning 
creature. Nothing, in his judgment, trains to reason closely so 
well as the study of mathematics, though Locke would have his 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 435 

boy "look into all sorts of knowledge," and train his understand- 
ing with a wide variety of exercises. In the education given in the 
grammar schools of his time he found much that seemed to him 
wasteful of time and thoroughly bad in principle, and he used 
much space to point out defects and describe better methods ol 
teaching and management, giving in some detail reasons there- 
for. His ideas as to needed reforms in the teaching of Latin 
(R. 227) are illustrative. 

Locke on elementary education. For the beginnings of educa- 
tion, and for elementary education in general, Locke sticks close 
to the prevaihng religious conception of his time. As for the edu- 
cation of the common people, he writes: 

The knowledge of the Bible and the business of his own calling is 
enough for the ordinary man; a Gentleman ought to go further. 

Continuing regarding the beginnings of education and the studies 
and textbooks of his day, he says: 

The Lord's Prayer, the Creeds, and the Ten Commandments, 't is 
necessary he should learn perfectly by heart. . . . What other Books 
there are in English of the Kind of those above-mentioned (besides the 
Primer) fit to engage the Liking of Children, and tempt them to read, 
1 do not know; . . . and nothing that I know has been considered of this 
Kind out of the ordinary Road of the Horn Book, Primer, Psalter, 
Testament, and Bible (§ 157). 

Locke does, however, give some very sensible suggestions as to the 
reading of the Bible (R. 228), the imparting of rehgious ideas to 
children, and the desirabiUty of transforming instruction so as to 
make it pleasant and agreeable, with plenty of natural playful 
activity.^ On this point he writes: 

He that has found a Way how to keep up a Child's Spirit easy, 
active, and free, and yet at the same time to restrain him from 
many Things he has a Mind to, and to draw him to Things that 
are uneasy to him ; he, I say, that knows how to reconcile these 
seeming Contradictions, has, in my Opinion, got the true Secret of 
Education (§ 46). 

Influence of Locke's Thoughts. The volume by Locke con- 
tains much that is sensible in the matter of educating a boy. The 

1 " Freedom and self-reliance, these are the watchwords of these two marvelously 
modern men (Montaigne and Locke). Expansion, real education, drawing out, 
widening out, that is the burden of their preaching; and voices in the wilderness 
theirs were! Narrowness, bigotry, flippancy, inertia, these were the rule until 
Rousseau's time, and even his voice was to fall upon deaf ears in England." (Mon- 
roe, Jas. P., Evolution of the Educational Ideal, p. 122.) 



436 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

emphasis on habit formation, reasoning, physical activities and 
play, the individuality of children, and a reformed method in 
teaching are its strong points. The thoroughly modern character 
of the book, in most respects, is one of its marked characteristics. 
The volume seems to have been much read by middle and upper- 
class Englishmen, and copies of it have been found in so many old 
colonial collections that it was probably well known among early 
eighteenth-century American colonists. That the book had an 
important influence on the attitude of the higher social classes of 
England toward the education of their sons and, consciously or 
unconsciously, in time helped to redirect the teaching in that 
most characteristic of English educational institutions, the Eng- 
lish Public (Latin Grammar) School, seems to be fairly clear. On 
elementary religious and charity-school education it had practi- 
cally no influence. 

Locke's great influence on educational thought did not come, 
though, for nearly three quarters of a century afterward, and it 
came then through the popularization of his best ideas by Rous- 
seau. Karl Schmidt ' well says of his work: 

Locke is a thorough Englishman, and the principle underlying his 
education is the principle according to which the English people have 
developed. Hence his theory of education has in the history of peda- 
gogy the same value that the English nation has in the history of the 
world. He stood in strong opposition to the scholastic and formalized 
education current in his time, a living protest against the prevailing 
pedantry; in the universal development of pedagogy he gives impulse 
to the movement which grounds education upon sound psychological 
principles, and lays stress upon breeding and the formation of char- 
acter. 

Restating and expanding the leading ideas of Locke in his 
Emile (chapter xxi), and putting them into far more attractive 
literary form, Rousseau scattered Locke's ideas as to educational 
reform over Europe, /in particular Rousseau popularized Locke's 
ideas as to the replacement of authority by reason and investiga- 
tion, his emphasis on physical activity and health, his contention 
that the education of children should be along lines that were 
natural and normal for children, and above all Locke's plea for 
education through the senses rather than the memory^ In so 
popularizing Locke's ideas, and at a time when all the political 
tendencies of the period were in the direction of the rejection of 

^ Schmidt, Karl, Geschichte der Padagogik, translated in Barnard's American 
Journal jj Education. 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 437 

authority and the emphasis of the individual, those educational 
reformers who were inspired by the writings of Rousseau created 
and appKed, largely on the foundations laid down by John Locke, 
a new theory as to educational aims and procedure which domi- 
nated all early nineteenth-century instruction. This we shall trace 
further in a subsequent chapter (chapter xxi). 

It was at this point that the educational problem stood, in so 
far as a theory as to educational aims and the educational process 
was concerned, when Rousseau took it up (1762). Before passing 
to a consideration of his work, though, and the work of those in- 
spired by him and by the French revolutionary writers and states- 
men, let us close this third part of our history by a brief survey of 
the development so far attained, the purpose, character, aims, 
and nature of instruction in the schools, and their means of sup- 
port and control at about the middle of the century in which 
Rousseau wrote, and before the philosophical and political revolu- 
tions of the latter half of the eighteenth century had begun to in- 
fluence educational aims and procedure and control. 

II. MID-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS 

The purpose. The purpose of maintaining the elementary 
vern acula r school, in all European lands, remained at the middle 
of the eighteenth century much as it was a century before, though 
in the German States and in the American Colonies there was a 
noticeable shifting of emphasis from the older exclusively religious 
purpose toward a newer conception of education as preparation 
for life in the world here. Still, one learned to read chiefly ''to 
learn some orthodox Catechism," "to read fluently in the New 
Testament," and to know the will of God, or, as stated in the law 
of the Connecticut Colony (R. 193), "in some competent measure 
to understand the main grounds and principles of Christian re- 
ligion necessary to salvation." The teacher was still carefully 
looked after as to his "soundness in the faith" (R. 238 a); he was 
required "to catechise his scholars in the principles of the Chris- 
tian religion," and "to commend his labors amongst them unto 
God by prayer morning and evening,^ taking care that his scholars 
do reverently attend during the same." The minister in practi- 
cally all lands examined the children as to their knowledge of the 
Catechism and the Bible, and on his visits quizzed them as to the 
Sunday sermon. In Boston (17 10) the ministers were required, 
* Rules for the schools of Dorchester, Massachusetts. 



438 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

on their school visits, to pray with the pupils, and "to entertain 
them with some instructions of piety adapted to their age." In 
Church-of- England schools "the End and Chief Design" of the 
schools established continued to be instruction in " the Knowledge 
and Practice of the Christian Religion as Professed and Taught in 
the Church of Ehgland" (R. 238 b). In German lands the ele- 
mentary vernaci?lar school was still regarded as "the portico of 
the Temple," " (Jhristianity its principal work," and not as "mere 
establishments preparatory to pubhc life, but be pervaded by the 
I'eligious spirit." ' The uniform system of pubhc schools ordered 
.•established for Prussia by Frederick the Great, in 1763, were after 
ah httle more than religious schools (R. 274), conducted for pur- 
poses of both Church and State. As Frederick expressed it, "we 
find it necessary and wholesome to have a good foundation laid in 
the schools by a rational and a Christian education of the young 
for the fear of God, and other useful ends." In the schools of 
La Salle's organization, which was most prominent in elementary 
vernacular education in Catholic France, the aim continued to be 
(R. 182) "to teach them to live honestly and uprightly, by in- 
structing them in the principles of our holy religion and by teach- 
ing them Christian precepts." 

Weakening of the old religious theory. By the middle of the 
eighteenth century, however, there is a noticeable weakening of 
the hold of the old religious theory on the schools in most Protes- 
tant lands. In England there was a marked relaxation of the 
old religious intolerance in educational matters as the century 
proceeded, and new textbooks, embodying but little of the old 
gloomy religious material, appeared and began to be used. By 
a series of decisions, between 1670 and 1701 (chapter xxiv), the 
English courts broke the hold of the bishops in the matter of the 
licensing of elementary schoolmasters, and by the Acts of 17 13 
and 1 7 14 the Dissenters were once more allowed to conduct 
schools of their own. Coincident with this growth of religious 
tolerance among the English we find the Church of England re- 
doubling its efforts to hold the children of its adherents, by the 
organization of parish schools and the creation of a vast system 
of charitable religious schools. In German lands, too, a marked 
shifting of emphasis away from solely religious ends and toward 
the needs of the government began, toward the end of the eight- 

1 Duke Eberhard Louis's Renewed Organization of the German School, 1720; re 
published 1782. 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 439 

eenth century, to be evident. In Wiirttemberg, which was some- 
what typical of late eighteenth-century action by other German 
States, a Circular of the General Synod, of November 1787, de- 
clares the German schools to be "those nurseries in which should 
be taught the true and genuine idea of the duties of men — cre- 
ated with a reasoning soul — ■ toward God, government, their fel- 
low-men, and themselves, and also at least the first rudiments of 
useful and indispensable knowledge." 

It was in the American Colonies, though, that the waning of the 
old religious interest was most notable. Due to rude frontier 
conditions, the decline in force of the old religious-town govern- 
ments, the diversity of sects, the rise of new trade and civil in- 
terests, and the breakdown of old-home connections, the hold on 
the people of the old religious doctrines was weakened .there ear- 
lier than in the old world. By 1750 the change in rehgious think- 
ing in America had become quite marked. As a consequence 
many of the earlier parochial schools had died out, while in the 
New England Colonies the colonial governments had been forced 
to exercise an increasing state oversight of the elementary school 
to keep it from dying out there as well. 

Studies and textbooks. The studies of the elementary vernac- 
ular school remained, throughout the whole of the eighteenth 
(' century, much as before, namely, reading, a httle writing and 
ciphering, some spelhng, rehgion, and in Teutonic countries a 
httle music. La Salle (R. 182) had prescribed, for the Cathohc 
vernacular schools of France, instruction in French, some Latin, 
"orthography, arithmetic, the matins and vespers, le Pater, TAve 
Maria, le Credo et le Confiteor, the Commandments, responses, 
Catechism, duties of a Christian, and maxims and precepts drawn 
from the Testament." The Catechism was to be taught one half- 
hour daily. The schoolbooks in England in Locke's day, as he 
tells us (p. 435), were "the Horn Book, Primer, Psalter, Testa- 
ment, and Bible." These indicate merely a reUgious vernacular 
school. The purpose stated for the EngHsh Church charity- 
schools (R. 238 b), schools that attained to large unportance in 
England and the American Colonies during the eighteenth cen- 
tury, shows them to have been, similarly, rehgious vernacular 
schools. The School Regulations which Frederick the Great 
promulgated for Prussia (1763), fixed the textbooks to be used 
(R. 274, § 20), and indicate that the instruction in Prussia was 
still restricted to reading, writing, religion, singing, and a little 



440 

arithmetic. 



Myp^ 



MmMEI 




Umnopqtjr 

«R»Xta«f|*2 

IntOtiDamtofGODtte 

DtBrf ai^tt.tt!)Uf) art mDt«. 
, Dcti.Aaloto<lib«tt)p garnet 
CDp limaetim nmtfvop uitl bt 
lone <ti em1i.t» it ts m^taMm 
»im bs tbii D«p ouTDatip bwaD 
|nDto2a>(u»< ouTtnCdaOis.a^ 
Dtt ttatmt tt)nn i|)at trttt«flr 
^jilnSUtaitb Itabtui not into 
l««tij»tKin/Aot t>cuiitrbBfcan» 

po6Mr.«it>tf»»c.f« tbtT amm. 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

In colonial America, Noah Webster's description 
(R. 230) of the schools he attended in Con- 
necticut, about 1764-70, shows that the 
studies and textbooks were "chiefly or 
wholly Dilworth's Spelling Books, the 
Psalter, Testament, and Bible," with a 
little writing and ciphering. A few words 
of description of these older books may 
prove useful here. 

, The Horn Book. The Horn Book goes 
back to the close of the fifteenth cen- 
tury,^ and by the end of the sixteenth 
century was in common use throughout 
England. Somewhat similar alphabet 
boards, lacking the handle, were also 
used in Holland, France, and in Ger- 
man lands. This, a thin oak board on 
which was pasted a printed shp, cov- 
ex^d by translucent horn, was the book 
from which children learned their letters 

„ A TT T. and began to read, the mastery of which 

Fig. 130. A Horn Book ,, ^ . ' . -^ „ 

usually required some time. Lowper 

thus describes this little book: 

Neatly secured from being soiled or torn 

Beneath a pane of thin translucent horn, 

A book (to please us at a tender age 

'T is called a book, though but a single page) 

Presents the prayer the Savior designed to teach, 

Which children use, and parsons — when they preach. 

The Horn Book was much used well into the eighteenth century, 
but its reading matter was in time incorporated into the school 
Primer, now evolved out of an earlier elementary religious man- 
ual. 

The Primer. Originally the child next passed to the Cate- 
chism and the Bible, but about the middle of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the Primer began to be used. The Primer in its original 
form was a simple manual of devotion for the laity, compiled 

1 One of the earliest horn books known appears in the illuminated manuscript 
shown in Figure 44, which dates from 1503. The first definitely known horn book 
in England dates from 1587, while most of the specimens found in museums date 
from about the middle of the eighteenth century. As improvements or variations 
of the horn book, cardboard sheets and wooden squares, known as battledores, ap- 
peared after 1 770. On these the illustrated alphabet was printed. (See Tuer, A. W., 
History of the Horn Book, 2 vols., illustrated, London, 1886, for detailed descriptions.) 




THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 441 

without any thought of its use in the schools. It contained the 
Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and a few of 
the more commonly used prayers and psalms.^ The Catechism 
soon was added, and with the prefixing of the alphabet and a few 
syllables and words it was transformed, as schools arose, into the 
first reading book for children. There was at first no attempt at 
grading, illustration, or the introduction of easy reading material. 
About the close of the seventeenth century the illustrated Primer, 
with some attempt at grading and some additional subject-mat- 
ter, made its appearance, both in England and America, and at 
once leaped into great popularity. 

The idea possibly goes back to the Orbis Picius (1654) of Co- 
menius (p. 413: R. 221), the first illustrated schoolbook ever 
written. The first English Primer adapted to school use was The 
Protestant Tutor, a rather rabid anti-Catholic work which ap- 
peared in London, about 1685. A later edition of this contained 
the alphabet, some syllables and words, the figures and letters, 
the list of the books of the Bible, an alphabet of lessons, the 
Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and a poem, 
long famous, on the death of the martyr, John Rogers.^ It was 
an abridgement of this book which the same publisher brought 
out in Boston, about 1690, under the name of The New England 
Primer (R. 202). This at once leaped into great popularity, and 
became the accepted reading book in all the schools of the Ameri- 
can Colonies except those under the Church of England. For 
the next century and a quarter it was the chief school and reading 
book in use among the Dissenters and Lutherans in America. 
Schoolmasters drilled the children on the reading matter and the 
Catechism it contained, and the people recited from it yearly in 
the churches. It was also used for such spelling as was given. It 
was the first great American textbook success, and was still in 
use in the Boston dame schools as late as 1806. It was reprinted 
in England, and enjoyed a great sale among Dissenters there. Its 
sales in America alone have been estimated at least three million 
copies. The sale in Europe was also large. It was followed in 

^ The diversity of religious primers which had grown up by 1565 led Henry VIII 
to cause to be issued a unified and official Primer, containing the Pater Noster, Ave 
Maria, Credo, and the Ten Commandments. 

2 The title-page of an edition of 1715 declares that edition to be: " The Protestant 
Tutor, instructing Youth and Others, in the compleat method of Spelling, Reading, 
and Writing True English: Also discovering to them the Notorious Errors, 
Damnable Doctrines, and cruel Massacres of the bloody Papists which England may 
expect from a Popish Successor." 



44^ 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



England by other Primers and other introductory reading books, 
of which The History of Genesis (1708), a series of simple stories 
retold from the first book of the Bible, and The Child's Weeks- 
Work (17 1 2), containing proverbs, fables, conundrums, lessons on 
behavior, and a short catechism, are types. Frederick the Great, 
in his list of required textbooks for Prussian schools (R. 274, § 20), 
does not mention a Primer. 

The Catechism. In all Protestant German lands the Shorter 
Catechism prepared by Luther, or the later Heidelberg Cate- 
chism; in Calvinistic 



THE 

SHORTER CATECHISM, 

Agreed upon by the Reverend Assemble 
of Oi V 1 N E$ at Wtfttninfitt, 

Ojrntl A r U tU ehUf Eoa of Man P 

l^ A* Man's chief End i$ to gloriff 
God and tsjoy him forever. 

Q. IVhot Rule hcth C«dghtt) to diuB ut 
finx) \oe may gUtiff and enfcy him f 

/. The Word of God which is contained in 
the Strip*ure$of the Old and New Teftament, 
E« the onty rule to dired us boiv Ave in&) 
Storify trtdenjoj Him. 
Q. )Vhat d9 the Seripture^ principally f((ichf 
A, The Scirpiurci principally teach vwhat 
Man is lu believe coftcemlfigGod, and what 
Duty God requires of Man. 
Q, ffhai ii God t 

A* God lsa$p{rit„ Infinite, Eternal and 

Unchangesble, In his Being, Wifdomi PaV- 

H, Holincfs, JjOice, Goodnefs and Tnuh* 

Q* Art thtre more Godi than Oat f 

Fig. 131. The Westminster CATEcmsM 

(A page from The New England Primer, natural size) 



lands the Catechism of 
Calvin; and in England 
and the American Col- 
onies the Westminster 
Catechism/ formed the 
backbone of the rehgious 
instruction. Teachers 
drilled their pupils in 
these as thoroughly as 
on any other subject, 
writing masters set as 
copies sentences from 
the book, children were 
required to memorize 
the answers, and the doc- 
trines contained were 
emphasized by teacher 
and preacher so that the 
children were saturated 
with the rehgious ideas 
set forth. No book ex- 
cept the Bible did so 
much to form the char- 



acter, and none so much to fix the rehgious bias of the children. 
Ahnost equal importance was given to the Catechism in Catholic 
lands (R. 182, §§ 21-22), though there supplemented by more 
religious influences derived from the ceremonial of the Church. 

1 This was compiled by the Westminster Assembly of Divines, called together 
by ParHament, in 1643, composed of 121 clergymen, 30 of the laity, and 5 special 
commissioners from Scotland. It held 1163 sessions, extending over six years, and 
framed the series of 107 questions and answers which appeared in the Primer as 
"The Shorter Catechism." 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 443 



Spellers. The next step forward, in the transition from the re- 
ligious Primer to secular reading matter for school children, came 
in the use of the so-called Spellers. Probably the first of these 
was The English School-Master of 
Edmund Coote (R. 229), first is- 
sued in 1596. This gave thirty- 
two pages to the alphabet and 
spelling; eighteen to a shorter Cat- 
echism, prayers, and psalms; five 
to chronology ; two to writing cop- 
ies; two to arithmetic; and twenty 
to a list of hard words, alpha- 
betically arranged and explained. 
As will be seen from this analysis 
of contents, this was a schoolmas- 
ter's general manual and guide. 
After about 1740 such books be- 
came very popular, due to the 
publication that year of Thomas 
Dilworth's A New Guide to the 
English Tongue. This book con- 
tained, as the title-page (R. 229) 
declared, selected Hsts of words 
with rules for their pronunciation, 
a short treatise on grammar, a col- 
lection of fables with illustrations 
for reading, some moral selections, 
and forms of prayer for children 




Fig. 132. Thomas Dilworth 

(?-i78o) 

The most celebrated English text- 
book writer of his day. 

(From the Frontispiece of his School- 
master's Assistant, 1743) 



It became very popular in New 
as well as in old England, and was followed by a long line of 
imitators, culminating in America in the pubKcation of Noah 
Webster's famous blue-backed American Spelling Book, in 1783. 
This was after the plan of the Enghsh Dilworth, but was put in 
better teaching form. It contained numerous graded Hsts of 
words, some illustrations, a series of graded reading lessons, and 
was largely secular in character. It at once superseded the expir- 
ing New England Primer in most of the American cities, and contin- 
ued popular in the United States for more than a hundred years. ^ 

^ So great was the sale of this book that the author was able to support his fam- 
ily, during the twenty years (1807-27) he was at work on his Dictwnary of the Eng- 
lish Language, entirely from the royalties from the Speller though the copyright re- 
turns were less than one cent a copy. At the time of his death (1843), the sales 
vere still approximately a million copies a year, and the book is still on sale. 



444 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




It was the second great American textbook success, and was 
followed by a long list of popular Spellers and Readers, leading 

up to the excellent secular Read- 
ers of the present day. 

Arithmetic and Writing. The 
first English Arithmetic, published 
about 1540 to 1542, has been en- 
tirely lost, and was probably read 
by few. The first to attain any 
popularity was Cocker's Arithmetic 
(1677), this "Being a Plain and 
Familiar Method suitable to the 
meanest Capacity, for the un- 
derstanding of that incomparable 
Art." A still more popular book 
was Arithmetick: or that Necessary 
Art Made Most Easie, by J. Hod- 
der, Writing Master, a reprint of 
which appeared in Boston, in 
1 7 19. The first book written by 
an American author was Isaac 
Greenwood's Arithmetick, Vulgar 
and Decimal, which appeared in 
Boston, in 1729. In 1743 appeared Dilworth's The Schoolmaster's 
Assistant, a book which retained its popularity in both England 
and America until after the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
No text in Arithmetic is mentioned in the School Regulations 
of Frederick the Great (R. 274, § 20), or in scarcely any of the de- 
scriptions left us of eighteenth-century schools. The study itself 
was common, but not universal, and was one that many teachers 
were not competent to teach. To possess a reputation as an 
" arithmeticker " was an important recommendation for a teacher, 
while for a pupil to be able to do sums in arithmetic was unusual, 
and a matter of much pride to parents. The subject was fre- 
quently taught by the writing master, in a separate school,^ while 
the reading teacher confined himself to reading, spelling, and re- 
ligion. Thus, for example, following earlier English practice, the 
Town Meeting of Boston, in 1789, ordered ''three reading schools 

^ In Nuremberg, as an example of German practice, the guild of writing and 
arithmetic masters continued, throughout all of the eighteenth century, and even 
into the nineteenth, as an organization separate from that of other types of 
te&chers. 



Fig. 133. Frontispiece to Noah 

Webster's "American 

Spelling Book" 

This is from the 1827 edition, reduced 
one third in size. 



THEORY AND ^^RACTICE BY 1750 445 



and three writing schools established in the town" for the in- 
struction of children between the ages of seven and fourteen, the 
subjects to be taught in each being: 

The reading schools 
Spelling 
Accentuation 

Reading of prose and verse 
English grammar and composition 



The writing scJwols 
Writing 
Arithmetic 



HOLDER'S 
ARITHMETICK 



OR. THAT 



NecefTaryART 

Made Moft Eafie ; 

Being explain 'd in a-Wiy familiar 
to the Capacity of any that de- 
fire to learn it in a little Time. 



By J. Hodder, Wiiting-Maftcr. 



7X. atom ani ^tooitietl) C»itioa, «£ 



The teacher might or might not possess an arithmetic of his own, 
but the instruction to the pupil was practically always dictated 
and copied instruction. Each pupil made up his own book of 
rules and solved problems, and few 
pupils ever saw a printed arithmetic. 
Many of the early arithmetics were 
prepared after the catechism plan. 
There was almost no attempt to use 
the subject for drill in reasoning or to 
give a concrete type of instruction, 
before about the middle of the eigh- 
teenth century,^ and but Httle along 
such reform hues was accomplished 
until after the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century. 

Writing, similarly, was taught by 
dictation and practice, and the art of 
the "scrivener," as the writing master 
was called, was one thought to be 
difficult to learn. The lack of prac- 
tical value of the art, the high cost of 
paper, and the necessity usually for 
special lessons, all alike tended to 
make writing a much less commonly 
known art than reading. Fees also 
were frequently charged for instruction in writing and arithmetic; 
reading, spelling, and religion being the only free subjects. The 
scrivener and the arithmetic teacher also frequently moved about, 

^ Francke, in his Institutions at Halle (p. 418), had tried to develop a number- 
toncept, and apply the teaching. In the Braunschweig-Liineburg school decree of 
1737 appeared directions for beginning number work by counting the fingers, apples, 
etc., and basing the multiplication table on addition. A few German writers during 
the eighteenth century suggested better instruction; Basedow (chapter xxii) tried 
to institute reform in the teaching of the subject^ but it was left for Pestalozzi 
^chapter xxi) to give the first real impetus to the rational teaching of the subiect, 



By William Hume, Philomalh. 



LO S D ON: 
PKnted lor D. Midwuittr, A Btt'^-.'Xna. anj 
C.JiitJi. R.fUmJln. A.hfarJ, J. 

J-Claikc, in tiuJl-Une. 1739. 



\- 



Fig. 134. Title-Page of 
Hodder's Arithmetic 

An early reprint of this famous 
book appeared in Boston in 1 7 19. 



446 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

as business warranted, and was not fixed as was the teacher of 
the reading school. / 

The teachers. The development of the vernacular school was 
retarded not only by the dominance of the religious purpose of the 
school, but by the poor quaHty of teachers found everywhere iii 
the schools. The evolution of the elementary-school teacher of 
to-day out of the church sexton, bell-ringer, or grave-digger,^ or 
out of the artisan, cripple, or old dame who added school teaching 
to other employment in order to live, forms one of the interesting 
as well as one of the yet-to-be-written chapters in the history of 
the evolution of the elementary school. 

Teachers in elementary schools everywhere in the eighteenth 
century were few in number, poor in quality, and occupied but 
a lowly position in the social scale. School dames in England 
(R. 235) and later in the American Colonies, and on the continent 
of Europe teachers who were more sextons, choristers, beadles, 
bell-ringers, grave-diggers, shoemakers, tailors, barbers, pension- 
ers, and invalids than teachers, too often formed the teaching body 
for the elementary vernacular school (Rs. 231, 232, 233). In 
Switzerland, the Netherlands, and some of the American Colo- 
nies, where schools had become or were becoming local semi-civic 
affairs, the standards which might be imposed for teaching also 
were low. The grant of the tailoring monopoly to the elementary 
teachers of Prussia,^ in 1738, and Kriisi's recollections of how he 
became a schoolmaster in Switzerland, in 1793 (R. 234), were 
quite typical of the time. In Catholic France, and in some German 
Catholic lands as well, teaching congregations (p.345), someof whose 
members had some rudimentary training for their work, were 
in charge of the existing parish schools. These provided a some- 
what better type of teaching body than that frequently found in 
Protestant lands, though by the latter part of the eighteenth cen- 
tury the beginnings of teacher-training are to be seen in some of 
the German States. The Church of England, too, had by this 

^ Such offices were not considered in any sense as degrading, and the attaching of 
the new duty of instructing the young of the parish in reading and religion dignified 
still more the other church office. As schools grew in importance there was a grad- 
ual shifting of emphasis, and finally a dropping of the earlier duties. Many early 
school contracts in America (Rs. 105; 236) called for such church duties on the part 
of the parish teacher. See also footnote, p. 370. 

2 In 1722 country schoolmasters in Prussia were ordered selected from tailors, 
weavers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and carpenters, and in 1738 they were granted 
the tailoring monopoly in their villages, to help them to live. Later Frederick the 
Great ordered that his crippled and superannuated soldiers should be given teaching 
positions in the elementary vernacular schools of Prussia. 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 447 




Fig. 135. A "Christian 
Brothers" School 

La Salle teaching at Grenoble. 
Note the adult type of dress of 
the boys. 



time organized strong Societies ^ for the preparation of teachers 
for Church-of-England schools, both at home and abroad. In 
Dutch, German, and Scandinavian lands, and in colonies founded 

by these people in America, the parish 

school, closely tied up with and depen- 'l^^^^^Mk^^^^^^r 
dent upon the parish church, was the 
prevaiHng type of vernacular school, 
and in this the teacher was regarded 
as essentially an assistant to the pastor 
(R. 236) and the school as a depend- 
ency of the Church. 

In England, in addition to regular 
parish schools and endowed element- 
ary schools, three peculiar institutions, 
known as the Dame School, the reli- 
gious charity-school, and the private- 
adventure or ''hedge school" had 
grown up, and the first two of these 
had reached a marked development 
by the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Because these were so charac- 
teristic of early EngHsh educational effort, and also played such 
an important part in the American Colonies as well, they merit 
a few words of description at this point. 

The Dame School. The Dame School arose in England after 
the Reformation. By means of it the increasing desire for a rudi- 
mentary knowledge of the art of reading could be satisfied, and at 
the same time certain women could earn a pittance. This type of 
school was carried early to the American Colonies, and out of it 
was in time evolved, in New England, the American elementary 
school. The Dame School was a very elementary school, kept in 
a kitchen or living-room by some woman who, in her youth, had 
obtained the rudiments of an education, and who now desired .to 
earn a small stipend for herself by imparting to the children of her 
neighborhood her small store of learning. For a few pennies a 
week the dame took the children into her home and explained to 
them the mysteries connected with learning the beginnings of 
reading and spelling. Occasionally a little writing and counting 

1 The "Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge," organized in 1600 
to aid the Church and provide schools at home, and the "Society for the Propaga- 
tion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts," organized in 1702 to supply ministers and teach- 
ers for churches and schools in the English colonies. 



448 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



also were taught, though not often in England. In the American 
Colonies the practical situations of a new country forced the em- 
ployment as teachers of women who could teach all three sub- 
jects, thus early creating the American school of the so-called 
"3RS" — "Reading, Riting, Rithmetic." The Dame School ap- 




FiG 136 An English Dame School 
(From a drawing of a school in the heart of London, after Barclay) 

pears so frequently in English literature, both poetry and prose, 
that it must have played a very important part in the beginnings 
of elementary education in England. Of this school Shenstone 
(1714-63) writes (R. 235): 

In every village marked with little spire, 
Embowered in trees, and hardly known to fame, 
There dwells, in lowly shed and mean attire, 
A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name, 
Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame. 

The Reverend George Crabbe (1754-1832), another poet of 
homely life, writes (R. 235) of a deaf, poor, patient widow who 
sits 

And awes some thirty infants as she knits; 

Infants of humble, busy wives who pay. 

Some trifling price for freedom through the day. 

This school flourished greatly in America during the eighteenth 
century, but with the coming of Infant Schools, early in the nine- 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 449 

teenth, was merged into these to form the American Primary 
School. 

The religious charity-school. Another thoroughly characteris- 
tic English institution was the church charity-school. The first 
of these was founded in WTiitechapel, London, in 1680. In 1699, 
when the School of Saint Anne, Soho (R. 237), was founded by 
"Five Earnest Laymen for the Poore Boys of the Parish," it was 
the sixth of its kind in England. In 1699 the ''Society for the 
Promotion of Christian Knowledge" (S.P.C.K.) was founded for 
the purpose, among other things, of establishing catechetical 
schools for the education of the children of the poor in the princi- 
ples of the Established Church (R. 238 b). In 1701 the "Society 
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" (S.P.G.) 
was also founded to extend the work of the Anglican Church 




Fig. 137. Gravel Lane Charity-School, Southwark 

Founded in 1687, and one of the earliest of the Non-Conformist English charity- 
schools. Still carrying on its work in the original schoolroom at the time this 
picture appeared, in Londina lUustrata, in 1819. 

abroad, supply schoolmasters and ministers, and establish schools, 
to train children to read, write, know and understand the Cate- 
chism, and fit into the teachings and worship of the Church. To 
develop piety and help the poor to lead industrious, upright, 
self-respecting lives, "to make them loyal Church members, 



450 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




and to fit them for work in that station of life in which it had 
pleased their Heavenly Father to place them," were the prin- 
cipal objects of the Society. 

All were taught reading, spelling, and the Cat- 
echism, and instruction in writing and arithmetic 
might be added. The training might also be 
coupled with that of the ''schools of industry" 
(workhouse schools, as described by Locke [R. 
217]) to augment the economic efficiency of the 
boy. Girls seem to have been provided for al- 
most equally with boys, and, in addition to being- 
taught to read and spell, were taught "to knit 
their Stockings and Gloves, to Mark, Sew, and 
make and mend their Cloathes." Both boys and 
girls were usually provided with books and cloth- 
ing,^ a regular uniform being worn by the boys 
and girls of each school. 

The chief motive in the establishment of these 
schools, though, was to decrease the "Prophaness 
and Debauchery . . . owing to a gross Igno- 
rance of the Christian ReHgion" (R. 237) and 
to educate "Poor Children in the Rules and 
Principles of the Christian Religion as professed 
and taught in the Church of England." Writ- 
ing, in 1742, Reverend Griffith Jones, an organizer for the 
S.P.C.K. in Wales, said: 

It is but a cheap education that we would desire for them [the poorj, 
only the moral and religious branches of it, which indeed is the most 
necessary and indispensable part. The sole design of this charity is to 
inculcate upon such ... as can be prevailed upon to learn, the knowl- 
edge and practice, the principles and duties of the Christian religion ; 
and to make them good people, useful members of society, faithful 
servants of God, and men and heirs of eternal life. 

These schools multiplied rapidly ard soon became regular in- 
stitutions, as the following table, showing the growth of the 
S.P.C.K. schools in London alone, shows: 

^ In 1704 the ordinary charge in London for a *' School of 50 Boys Cloathed comes 
to about £75 per Annum, for which a School-Room, Books, and Firing are provided, 
a Master paid, and to each Boy is given yearly, 3 Bands, i Cap, i Coat, i Pair of 
Stockings, and one Pair of Shooes." A girls' school of the same size cost £60 per 
annum, which paid for the room, books, mistress, fixing and oroviding each girl 
with " 2 Coyfs, 2 Bands, i Gown and Petticoat, i Pair of knit Gloves, i Pair of 
Stockings, and 2 Pair of Shooes." 



Fig. 138. 
A Charity- 
ScHOOL Girl 
IN Uniform 

Saint Anne's, 
Soho, England 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 451 



Year 


Schools 


Boys 


Girls 


Total 


1699 














1704 


54 


1386 


745 


2131 


1709 


88 


2181 


1221 


3402 


1714 


117 


3077 


1741 


4818 



In England and Ireland combined the Society had, by 17 14, a 
total of 1073 schools, with 19,453 pupils enrolled, and by 1729 the 
number had increased to 1658, with approx- 
imately 34,000 pupils. From England the 
charity-school idea was early carried to the 
Anglican Colonies in America and became a 
^ed institution in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 
Delaware, Mar^dand, and somewhat in the 
Colonies farther south. In the Pennsylvania 
constitution of 1790 we find the following 
directions for the establishment of a state 
charity-school system to supplement the par- 
ish schools of the churches: 

Sec. I. The legislature shall, as soon as con- 
veniently may be, provide, by law, for the estab- 
lishment of schools throughout the State, in such 
manner that the poor may be taught gratis. 




Fig. 139. 

A Charity-School 

Boy in Uniform 

Saint Anne's, 
Soho, England 

This was a school 



The first Pennsylvania school law of 1802 
carried this direction into effect by providing 
for pauper schools in the counties, a condi- 
tion that was not done away with until 1834. 
In New Jersey the system lasted until 1838. 
The private-adventure, or " hedge," school, 
analogous to the Dame School, but was kept by a man instead of 
a woman, and usually at his home or shop. Plate 15, showing 
a shoe cobbler teaching, represents one type of such schools. The 
term ''hedge schools" arose in Ireland, where teaching was for- 
bidden the Cathohcs, and secret schools arose in which priests and 
others taught what was possible. Of these McCarthy writes: ^ 

On the highways and on the hillsides, in ditches and behind hedges, 
in the precarious shelter of the ruined walls of some ancient abbey, or 
under the roof of a peasant's cabin, the priests set up schools and taught 
the children of their race. 

The term soon came to be applied to any kind of a poor school, 
taught in an irregular manner or place. Similar irregular schools. 

^ McCarthy, Justin H., Ireland since the Union, p. 13. 



452 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

under equivalent names, also were found in German lands/ the 
Netherlands, and in France, while in the American Colonies "in- 
dentured white servants" were frequentty let out as schoolmas- 
ters. The following advertisement of a teacher for sale is typical 
of private-adventure elementary school- keeping during the colo- 



To Be DISPOSED of, 

A Likely Servant Mans Time for 4 Years 
who is very well Qualified for a Clerk or to teach 
a School, he Reads, Writes, underftands Arithmetick aod 
Accompts very well, Enquire of thePrioecr hereof. 

Fig. 140. Advertisement for a Teacher to Let 
(From the American Weekly Mercury of Philadelphia, 1735) 

nial period. These schools were taught by itinerant school-keep- 
ers, artisans, and tutors of the poorer type, but offered the begin- 
nings of elementary education to many a child who otherwise 
would never have been able to learn to read. In the early eight- 
eenth century these schools attained a remarkable development 
in England. 

A new influence of tremendous future importance — general 
reading — was now coming in; the vernacular was fast supplant- 
ing Latin ; newspapers were being started ; little books or pam- 
phlets (tracts) containing general information were being sold; 
books for children and beginners were being written; the popular 
novel and story had appeared; - and all these educative forces 
were creating a new and a somewhat general desire for a knowl- 
edge of the art of reading. This in turn caused a new demand 
for schools to teach the long-locked-up art, and this demand wai 
capitalized to the profit of many types of people. 

The apprenticing of orphans and children of the poor. The 
compulsory apprenticing of the children of the poor, as we have 
seen (p. 326), was an old English institution, and workhouse train- 
ing, or the so-called "schools of industry," became, by the eight- 
eenth century, a prominent feature of the EngHsh care of the 
poor. These represented the only form of education supported 

^ Frederick the Great, in the General School Regulations issued in 1763 (R. 274, 
§ 15), strictly prohibited the keeping of "hedge schools" in the towns and rural dis- 
tricts of Prussia. 

2 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678,) Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), and 
Gulliver's Travels (1726). The publication of these tremendously stimulated the 
desire to read. 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 453 

by taxation, and the only form of education to which Parliament 
gave any attention during the whole of the eighteenth centur}^ 
This type of institution also was carried to the Anglican Colo- 
nies in America, as we have seen in the documents for Virginia (R. 
200 a), and became an established institution in America as well. 

The apprenticing of boys to a trade, a still older institution, 
was also much used as a means for training youths for a life in the 
trades, not only in England and the American Colonies, but 
throughout all European lands as well. The conditions surround- 
ing the apprenticing of a boy had by the eighteenth century be- 
come quite fixed. The " Indenture of Apprenticeship " was drawn 
up by a lawyer, and by it the master was carefully bound to clothe 
and feed the boy, train him properly in his trade, look after his 
morals, and start him in Hfe at the end of his apprenticeship. This 
is well shown in the many records which have been preserved, 
both in England (R. 242) and the American Colonies (R. 201). 
For many boys this t^-pe of education was the best possible at the 
time, and worthily started the possessor in the work of his trade. 

In the eighteenth century different English church parishes be- 
gan to set up workhouse schools of various types, and to maintain 
these out of parish "rates." The one established in Bishopsgate 
Street, London, in 1701, is typical. This cared for about 375 
children and in it, by 1720, there had been educated and placed 
forth 1420 children, and in addition 123 had died. Of this school 
it is recorded that poor children 

"being taken into the said Workhouse are there taught to Read and 
Write, and kept to Work until they are qualified to be put out to be 
Apprentices, and for the Sea Service, or otherwise disposed; . . . The 
Habit of the Children is all the same, being made of Russit Cloth, and 
a round Badge worn upon their Breast, representing a poor Boy, and 
a Sheep; the Motto: ' God's Providence is our Inheritance.' "... In this 
worldiouse children were "taught to spin Wool and Flax, to Sow and 
Knit, to make their own Cloaths, Shoes, and Stockings, and the like 
Employments ; to inure them betimes to labour. They are also taught 
to read, and such as are capable, to write and cast Accounts; and also 
the Catechism, to ground them in Principles of Religion and Honesty." ^ 

The school established by Saint John's parish, Southwark, Lon- 
don, in 1735, and designed to train and "put out" girls for domes- 
tic service (R. 241), and which cared for, clothed, and trained 
forty girls, is also typical of these parish schools "for the children 
of the industrious poor." 

^ Strype, John, Stowe's Survey of London, 1720; bk. i, pp. 199, 201-02. 



454 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Methods of instruction. Throughout the eighteenth century 
the method of instruction commonly employed in the vernacular 
schools was what was known as the individual method. This wa*:" 
wasteful of both time and effort, and unpedagogical to a high de- 
gree (R. 244). Everywhere the teacher was engaged chiefly in 
hearing recitations, testing memory, and keeping order. The 
pupils came to the master's desk, one by one (see Figures 98, 99), 
and recited what they had memorized. Aside from imposing dis- 
cipline, teaching was an easy task. The pupils learned the as- 
signed lessons and recited what they had learned. Such a thing 
as methodology — ■ technique of instruction — was unknown. 
The dominance of the religious motive, too, precluded any liberal 
attitude in school instruction, the individual method was time- 
consuming, school buildings often were lacking, and in general 
there was an almost complete lack of any teaching equipment, 
books, or suppHes. Viewed from any modern standpoint the 
schools of the eighteenth century attained to but a low degree of 
efficiency (R. 244). The school hours were long, the schoolmas- 
ter's residence or place of work or business was commonly used as 
a schoolroom, and such regular schoolrooms as did exist were 
dirty and noisy and but poorly suited to school purposes. Schools 
everywhere, too, were ungraded, the school of one teacher being 
like that of any other teacher of that class. 

So wasteful of time and effort was the individual method of in- 
struction that children might attend school for years and get only 
a mere start in reading and writing. Paulsen,^ writing of schools 
in German lands at an even later date, says that even in the better 
type of vernacular schools 

many children never achieved anything beyond a little reading anc 
knowing a few things by heart. . . . The instruction in reading was 
never anything else but a torture, protracted through years, from 
saying the alphabet and formation of syllables to the deciphering of 
complete words, without any real success in the end, while writing was 
nothing but a wearisome tracing of the letters, the net result of all 
the toil being the gabbling of the Catechism and a few Bible texts and 
hymns, learned over and over again. 

The imparting of information by the teacher to a class, or a class 
discussion of a topic, were almost unknown. Hearing lessons, 
assigning new tasks, setting copies, making quill pens, dictating 
sums, and imposing order completely absorbed the time and the 
attention of the teacher. 

' Paulsen, Friedrich, German Education, p. 141. 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 455 



School discipline. The discipline everywhere was severe. "A 
boy has a back; when you hit it he understands," was a favorite 
pedagogical maxim of the time. Whipping-posts were sometimes 
set up in the schoolroom, and practically 
riiM all pictures of the schoolmasters of the 

time show a bundle of switches near 
at hand. Boys in the Latin grammar 
schools were flogged for petty offenses 
(R. 245). The abihty to impose order 
on a poorly taught and, in consequence, 
an unruly school was always an impor- 




FiG. 141. A School 

WfflPPING-POST 

Drawn from a picture of a five- 
foot whipping-post which once 
stood in the floor of a school- 
house at Sunderland, Massa- 
chusetts. Now in the Deerfield 
Museum. 

tant requisite of the 
schoolmaster. A Swab- 
ian schoolmaster, Hau- 
berle by name, with 
characteristic Teutonic 
attention to details, has 
left on record ^ that, in 
the course of his fifty- 
one years and seven 
months as a teacher 
he had, by a moder- 
ate computation, given 
911,527 blows with a 
cane, 124,010 blows 
with a rod, 20,989 blows 
and raps with a ruler, 

' Barnard, Henry. Trans- 
lated from Karl von Raumer; 
in his American Journal of 
Education, vol. v, p. 509. 




Fig. 142. An Eighteenth-Century German 
School 

Reproduction of an engraving by J. Mettenleiter, 
now in the Kupferstichkabinet, Munich, and printed 
in Joh. Ferd. Schlez's Dorfschulen zu Langenhausen. 
Nuremberg, 1795. 



456 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

136,715 blows with the hand, 10,235 blows over the mouth, 
7,905 boxes on the ear, 1,115,800 raps on the head, and 22,763 
nolabenes with the Bible, Catechism, singing book, and grammar. 
He had 777 times made boys kneel on peas, 613 times on a triangu- 
lar piece of wood, had made 3001 wear the jackass, and 1707 hold 
the rod up, not to mention various more unusual punishments he 
had contrived on the spur of the occasion. Of the blows with the 
cane, 800,000 were for Latin words; of the rod 76,000 were for 
texts from the Bible or verses from the singing book. He also had- 
about 3000 expressions to scold with, two thirds of which were 
native to the German tongue and the remainder his invention. 

Another illustration of German school discipline, of many that 
might be cited, was the reform work of Johann Ernest Christian 
Haun, who was appointed, in 1783, as inspector of schools in the 
once famous Gotha (p. 317). Due to warfare and neglect the 
schools there had fallen into disrepute. Haun drove the incapa- 
ble teachers from the work, and for a time restored the schools to 
something of their earlier importance. Among other reforms it is 
recorded that he forbade teachers to put irons around the boys' 
necks, to cover them with mud, to make them kneel on peas, or to 
brutally beat them. Diesterweg (R. 244) describes similar pun- 
ishments as characteristic of eighteenth-century German schools. 
The eighteenth-century German schoolmaster shown in Fig. 142 
was probably a good sample of his class. 

Pedagogical writers of the time uniformly complain of the se- 
vere discipline of the schools, and the literature of the period 
abounds in allusions to the prevailing harshness of the school dis- 
cipline. A few writers condemn, but most approve heartily of the 
use of the rod. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" had for long 
been a well-grounded pedagogical doctrine. Among many literary 
extracts that might be cited illustrating this belief, the following 
poem by the Enghsh poet Crabbe (1754-1832) is interesting. He 
puts the following words into the mouth of his early schoolmaster: 

Students like horses on the road, 

Must be well lashed before they take the load; 

They may be willing for a time to run, 

But you must whip them ere the work be done; 

To tell a boy, that if he will improve. 

His friends will praise him, and his parents love, 

Is doing nothing — he has not a doubt 

But they will love him, nay, applaud without; 

Let no fond sire a boy's ambition trust, 

To make him study, let him learn he must. 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 457 

Conditions surrounding childhood. It is difficult for us of to- 
day to re-create in imagination the pitiful life-conditions which 
surrounded children a century and a half ago. Often the lot of 
the children of the poor, who then constituted the great bulk of 
all children, was little less than slavery. Wretchedly poor, dirty, 
unkempt, hard- worked, beaten about, knowing strong drink 
early, ilHterate, often vicious — their lot was a sad one. For the 
children of the poor there were few, if any, educational opportuni- 
ties. Writing on the subject David Salmon says: ^ 

The imagination of the twentieth century cannot fathom the pov- 
erty of the eighteenth. The great development of mines and manu- 
factures, which has brought ease and independence within the reach of 
industrious labour everywhere, had hardly begun ; employment was so 
scarce and intermittent, and wages were so low, that the working 
classes lived in hovels, dressed in rags, and were familiar with the 
pangs of hunger; while those who were forced to look to the rates for 
hovels, rags, and food sufficient to maintain a miserable life numbered 
a sixth of the whole population. 

In the towns children were apprenticed out early in life, and for 
long hours of daily labor. Child welfare was almost entirely neg- 
lected, children were cuffed about and beaten at their work, Juve- 
nile dehnquency was a common condition, child mortahty was 
heavy, and ignorance was the rule. Schools generally were pay 
institutions or a charity, and not a birthright, and usually existed 
only for the middle and lower-middle classes in the population 
who were attendants at the churches and could afford to pay a 
little for the schooling given. Reading and rehgion were usually 
the only free subjects. Only in the New England Colonies, where 
the beginnings of town and colony school systems were evident, 
and in a few of the German States where state control was begin- 
ning to be exercised, was a better condition to be found. 

Among the middle and upper social classes, particularly on 
the continent of Europe, a stiff artificiaHty everywhere prevailed. 
Children were dressed and treated as miniature adults, the normal 
activities of childhood were suppressed, and the natural interests 
and emotions of children found little opportunity for expression. 
Wearing powdered and braided hair, long gold-braided coats, em- 
broidered waistcoats, cockaded hats, and swords, boys were 
treated more as adults than as children. Girls, too, with their 
long dresses, hoops, powdered hair, rouged faces, and demure 

^ Salmon, David, " The Education of the Poor in the Eighteenth Century " ; 
in Educational Record, London, 1908. 



458 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig, 143. Children as Miniature Adults 

Children leaving school, from an eighteenth-century drawing by 
Saint Aubin. 



manner, were trained in a, for children, most unnatural man- 
ner.^ The dancing master for their manners and graces, and the 
religious instructor to develop in them the ability to read and 
to go through a largely, meaningless ceremonial, were the chief 
guides for the period of their childhood. 

1 "If you would comprehend the success of Rousseau's Emile, call to mind the 
children we have described, the embroidered, gilded, dressed-up, powdered little 
gentlemen, decked with sword and sash, . . . alongside of these, little ladies of six 
years, still more artificial, — so many veritable dolls to which rouge is applied, and 
with which a mother amuses herself for an hour and then consigns them to tier maids 
for the rest of the day. This mother reads Entile. It is not surprising that she 
immediately strips the poor little thing (of its social harness of whalebone, iron, and 
hair) and determines to nurse her next child herself." (Taine, H. A., The Ancient 
Regime, vo'. 11, p. 273.) 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 459 

School support. No uniform plan, in any country, had as yet 
been evolved for even the meager support which the schools of the 
time received. The Latin grammar schools were in nearly all 
cases supported by the income from old "foundations" and frorr 
students' fees, with here and there some state aid; The new ele- 
mentary vernacular schools, though, had had assigned to them 
few old foundations upon which to draw for maintenance, and in 
consequence support for elementary schools had to be built up 
from new sources, and this required time. 

In England the Act of Conformity of 1662 (R. 166), it will be 
remembered (p. 324), had laid a heavy hand on the schools by 
driving all Dissenters from positions in them, and the Five-Mile 
Act of 1665 had borne even more severely on the teachers in the 
schools of the Dissenters. Fortunately for elementary education 
in England, however, the Enghsh courts, in 1670, had decided in a 
test case that the teacher in an elementary school could not be de- 
prived of his position by failure of the bishop to license him, if he 
were a nominee of the founder or the lay patron of the school. 
The result of this decision was that, between 1660 and 1730, 905 
endowed elementary schools were founded in England, and 72 
others previously founded had their endowments increased. The 
number continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century, 
and by 1842 had reached a total of 2194. These new foundations 
probably gave the best schooling of the time, and tended to stir 
the Estabhshed Church to action. Accordingly we find that dur- 
ing the eighteenth century the vestries of the different church 
parishes began the creation of parish elementary schools for the 
children of the poor of the parish, supporting a teacher for them 
out of the parish rates, and without specific legal authorization to 
do so. These new parish schools also contributed somewhat to 
the provision of elementary education, and mark the beginning of 
the church "voluntary schools" which were such a characteristic 
feature of nineteenth-century English education. We thus have, 
in England, endowed elementary schools, parish schools, dame 
schools, private- adventure schools of many types, and charity- 
schools, all existing side by side, and drawing such support as 
they could from endowment funds, parish rates, church tithes, 
subscriptions, and tuition fees. The support of schools by sub- 
scription lists (R. 240) was a very common proceeding. Educa- 
tion in England, more than in any other Protestant land, early 
came to be regarded as a benevolence which the State was under 



46o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

no obligation to support. Only workhouse schools were provided 
for by the general taxation of all property. 

In the Netherlands and in German lands church funds, town 
funds, and tuition fees were the chief means of support, though 
here and there some prince had provided for something approach- 
ing state support for the schools of his little principahty. Fred- 
erick the Great had ordered schools established generally (1763) 
and had decreed the compulsory attendance of children (R. 274), 
but he had depended largely on church funds and tuition fees (§7) 
for maintenance, with a proviso that the tuition of poor and or- 
phaned children should be paid from "any funds of the church or 
town, that the schoolmaster may get his income " (§8). In Scot- 
land the church parish school was the prevailing type. In France 
/ the religious societies (p. 345) provided nearly all the elementary 
y \^ vernacular religious education that was obtainable. 

In the Dutch Provinces, in the New England Colonies, and in 
some of the minor German States, we find the clearest examples of 
the beginnings of state control and maintenance of elementary 
schools — something destined to grow rapidly and In the nine- 
teenth century take over the school from the Church and main- 
tain it as a function of the State. The Prussian kings early made 
grants of land and money for endowment funds and support, and 
state aid was ordered granted by Maria Theresa for Austria (R. 
274 a), in 1774. In the New England Colonies the separation of 
the school from the Church, and the beginnings of state support 
and control of education, found perhaps their earliest and clearest 
exemplification. In the other Colonies the lottery was much 
used (R. 246) to raise funds for schools, while church tithes, sub- 
scription lists, and school societies after the English pattern also 
helped in many places to start and support a school or schools. 

Only by some such means was it possible in the eighteenth cen- 
tury that the children of the poor could ever enjoy any opportuni- 
ties for education. The parents of the poor children, themselves 
uneducated, could hardly be expected to provide what they had 
never come to appreciate themselves. On the other hand, few of 
the well-to-do classes felt under any obligation to provide educa- 
tion for children not their own. There was as yet no realization 
that the diffusion of education contributed to the welfare of the 
State, or that the ignorance of the masses might be in any way a 
public peril. This attitude is well shown for England by the fact 
that not a single law relating to the education of the people, aside 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 461 

from workhouse schools, was enacted by Parliament during the 
whole of the eighteenth century. The same was true of France 
until the coming of the Revolution. It is to a few of the German 
States and to the American Colonies that we must turn for the 
beginnings of legislation directing school support. This we shall 
describe more in detail in later chapters. 

The Latin Secondary School. The great progress made in edu- 
cation during the eighteenth century, nevertheless,- was in ele- 
mentary education. Concerning the secondary schools and the 
universities there is little to add to what has previously been said. 
During this century the secondary school, outside of German 
lands, remained largely stationary. Having become formal and 
Hfeless in its teaching (p. 283), and in England and France 
crushed by religious-uniformity legislation, the Latin grammar 
school of England and the surviving colleges in France practically 
ceased to exert any influence on the national Kfe. The Jesuit 
schools, which once had afforded the best secondary education in 
Europe, had so declined in usefulness everywhere that they were 
about to be driven from all lands. The Act of Conformity of 1 662 
(R. 166) had dealt the grammar schools of England a heavy blow, 
and the eighteenth century found them in a most wretched condi- 
tion, with few scholars, and their endowments shamefully abused. 
The Law of 1662, says Montmorency, "involved such a peering 
into the lives of schoolmasters, such a course of inquisitorial folly, 
that the position became intolerable. Men would not become 
schoolmasters. . . . Education had no meaning when none but 
poUtical and religious hypocrites were allowed to teach. . . . Na- 
tional education was destroyed," and the grammar schools of 
England were "practically withdrawn during more than two cen- 
turies (1662-1870) from the national life." ^ 

In German lands the old Latin schools continued largely un- 
changed until near the middle of the eighteenth century, with 
Latin, taught as it had been for a century or more, as the chief 
subject of study. Shortly after the coming of Frederick the 
Great to the throne (1740) the Latin schools of Prussia, and after 
them the Latin schools in other German States, were reorganized 
and given a new Hfe. The influence of Francke's school at Halle 
(p. 418), and the new types of teaching developed there and by 
his followers elsewhere, began to be felt. German, French, and 
mathematics were given recognition, and some science work was 
^ Montmorency, J. E. G. de., The Progress of Education in England, pp. 46, 50. 



462 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

here and there introduced. Above all, though, Greek now at- 
tained to the place of first importance in the reorganized Latin 
schools. 

It was not until after 1 740 that the German people awakened 
to the possibility of an independent national life. Then, under 
the new impulse toward nationality, French influence and man- 
ners were thrown off, German Uterature attained its Golden Age, 
the Ritterakademieen (p. 405) were discarded, and a number of 
the German Principalities and States revised their school regula- 
tions and erected, out of the old Latin schools, a series of human- 
istic gymnasia in which the study of Greek life and culture occu- 
pied the foremost place. New methods in classical study were 
tliought out and appHed, and a new pedagogical purpose — ■ cul- 
ture and discipHne — was given to the regenerated Latin schools. 
A new Renaissance, in a way, took place in German lands, ^ and 
a knowledge of Greek was proclaimed by German university and 
gymnasial teachers as indispensable to a liberal education with 
an earnestness of conviction not exceeded by Battista Guarino 
(p. 268) four centuries before. To know Greek and to have some 
familiarity with Greek literature and history now came to be re- 
garded as necessary to the highest culture,^ and a pedagogical 
theory for such study was erected, based on the discipline of the 
mind,^ which dominated the German classical school throughout 
the entire nineteenth century. It was in the eighteenth century 

1 A change now took place in the intellectual life of Germany: "The nation began 
to make itself independent of French influence. In literature Klopstock and 
Lessing broke the fetters of French classicism. An ardent desire for a deeper culture 
peculiar to the German people asserted itself. But the soil of the national life was 
too poor in genus for a purely German culture, hence scholars looked for new models 
and found them in classical antiquity. The ancient authors became again the mas- 
ters of culture and taste; with this difference, though, that it was not desired to 
learn how to express their thoughts as well as the learner's thoughts in Latin, but to 
become familiar with their manner of thinking and feeling, for the purpose of en- 
larging and ennobling German thought and speech. From this standpoint Greek, 
on account of ) its more valuable literature, assumed a higher importance, and, by 
degrees, a superiority over Latin." (Nohle, E., History of the Gertnan School Sys- 
tem, pp. 48-49.) 

2 "If any one be destined for a studious career, let him not shirk his Greek les- 
sons, inasmuch as he would thereby suffer irretrievable loss. ... He who reads the 
classic writers, studying mathematical reasoning at the same time, trains his mind 
to distinguish what is true or false, beautiful or unsightly, fills his memory with 
manifold fine thoughts, attains skill in grasping the ideas of others as well as in 
fluently expressing his own, acquires a number of excellent maxims for the improve- 
ment of the understanding and the will, and thus learns by practice nearly all that 
a good compendium of philosophy could teach him in systematic order and dog- 
matic form." (School Regulations for Braunschweig-Liineburg, of 1737.) 

* "Be assured that if you forget your Greek, yes, even your Latin too, you still 
have the advantage of having given your mind a training and discipHne that will ga 
with you into your future occupation." (Friedrich Gedike, 1 755-1803.) 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 463 




Fig. 144. A Pennsylvania Academy 

York Academy, York, Pennsylvania, 
founded by the Protestant Episcopal 
Church, in 1787. 



also that the German States began the development of the scien- 
tific secondary school (Realschule) , see p. 420, as described in a 
preceding chapter. 

Rise of the Academy in America. As we have seen (p. 361), 
the English Latin grammar school was early (1635) carried to New 
England, and set up there and elsewhere in the Colonies, but after 
the close of the seventeenth 
century its continued main- 
tenance was something of a 
struggle. Particularly in the 
central and southern colonies, 
where commercial demands 
early made themselves felt, the 
tendency was to teach more 
practical subjects. This tend- 
ency led to the evolution, about 
the middle of the eighteenth 
century, of the distinctively 
American Academy, with a 
more practical curriculum, and by the close of the century it 
was rapidly superseding the older Latin grammar school. Frank- 
lin's Academy at Philadelphia, which began instruction in 1751, 
and which later evolved into the University of Pennsylvania, was 
probably the first American Academy. The first in Massachu- 
setts was founded in 1761, and by 1800 there were seventeen in 
Massachusetts alone. The great period of academy develop- 
ment was the first half of the nineteenth century. The Phillips 
Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts, founded in 1788, re- 
veals clearly the newer purpose of these American secondary 
schools. The foundation grant of this school gives the purpose 
to be: 

to lay the foundation of a pubhc free school or ACADEMY for the 
purposes of instructing Youth, not only in English and Latin Gram- 
mar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences wherein they are com- 
monly taught; but more especially to learn them the GREAT END 
AND REAL BUSINESS OF LIVING ... it is again declared that 
the first and principle object of this Institution is the promotion of 
TRUE PIETY and VIRTUE; the secotid, instruction in the English, 
Latin, and Greek Languages, together with Writing, Arithmetic, 
Music, and the Art of Speaking; the third, practical Geometry, Logic, 
and Geography; and the fourth, such other liberal Arts and Sciences or 
Languages, as opportunity and ability may hereafter admit, and as 
the TRUSTEES shall direct. 



464 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Though still deeply religious, these new schools usually were free 
from denominationaHsm. Though retaining the study of Latin, 
they made most of new subjects of more practical value. A study 
of real things rather than words about things, and a new emphasis 
/on the native EngHsh and on science were prominent features of 
<lieir work. They were also usually open to girls, as well as boys, 
— an innovation in secondary education before almost wholly 
unknown. Many were organized later for girls only. These 
institutions were the precursors of the American public high 
school, itself a type of the most democratic institution for secon- 
dary education the world has ever known. 

The universities. The condition of the universities by the 
middle of the eighteenth century we traced in the preceding chap- 
ter. They had lost their earHer importance as institutions of 
learning, but in a few places the sciences were slowly gaining a 
foothold, and in German lands we noted the appearance of the 
first two modern universities — institutions destined deeply to 
influence subsequent university development, as we shall point 
out in a later chapter. 

End of the transition period. We have now reached, in our 
study of the history of educational progress, the end of the transi- 
tion period which marked the change in thinking from mediaeval 
to modern attitudes. The period was ushered in with the begin- 
nings of the Revival of Learning in Italy in the fourteenth cen- 
tury, and it may fittingly close about the middle of the eigh- 
teenth. 

We now stand on the threshold of a new era in world history. 
The same questioning spirit that animated the scholars of the 
Revival of Learning, now full-grown and become bold and self- 
coniident, is about to be applied to affairs of politics and govern- 
ment, and we are soon to see absolutism and mediaeval attitudes 
in both Church and State questioned and overthrown. New 
political theories are to be advanced, and the divine right of the 
people is to be asserted and established in England, the American 
Colonies, and in France, and ultimately, early in the twentieth 
century, we are to witness the final overthrow of the divine-right- 
of-kings idea and a world-wide sweep of the democratic spirit. 
A new human and political theory as to education is to be evolved; 
the school is to be taken over from the Church, vastly expanded 
in scope, and made a constructive instrument of the State; and 
the wonderful nineteenth century is to witness a degree of human, 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 465 

scientific, political, and educational progress not seen before in 
all the days from the time of the Crusades to the opening of the 
nineteenth century. It is to this wonderful new era in world 
history that we now turn. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Contrast a religious elementary school, with the Catechism as its chief 
textbook, with a modern public elementary school. 

2. Contrast the elementary schools of Mulcaster and Comenius. 

3. To what extent did the religious teachings of the time support Locke's 
ideas as to the disciplinary conception of education? 

4. Do we to-day place as much emphasis on habit formation as did Locke? 
On character? On good breeding? 

5. State some of the reasons for the noticeable weakening of the hold of the 
old religious theory as to education, in Protestant lands, by the middle 
of the eighteenth century. 

6. How do you explain the slow evolution of the elementary teacher into a 
position of some importance? Is the evolution still in process? Illus- 
trate. 

7. What were the motives behind the organization of the religious charity- 
schools? 

8. Show how tax-supported workhouse schools represented, for England, 
the first step in public-school maintenance. 

9. Show that teaching under the individual method of instruction was 
school keeping, rather than school teaching. 

10. How do you explain the general prevalence of harsh discipline well into 
the nineteenth century? 

11. Did any other country have, in the eighteenth century, so mixed a type 
of elementary education as did England? Why was it so badly mixed 
there? 

12. Show how the English Act of Conformity, of 1662, stifled the English 
Latin grammar schools. 

13. What reasons were there for the development of the more practical 
Academy in America, rather than in England? 

14. Compare the American Academy with the German Reahchule. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections, illustrative 
cf the contents of this chapter, are reproduced: 

226. Mulcaster: Table of Contents of his Positions. 

227. Locke: On the Teaching of Latin. 

228. Locke: On the Bible as a Reading Book. 

229. Coote-Dilworth: Two early "Spelling Books." 

230. Webster: Description of Pre-Revolutionary Schools. 

231. Raumer: Teachers in Gotha in 1741. 

232. Raumer: An i8th Century Swedish People's School. 

233. Raumer: Schools of Frankfurt-am-Main during the Eighteenth Cen« 
tury. 

234. Kriisi: A Swiss Teacher's Examination in 1793. 

335. Crabbe; White; Shenstone: The English Dame School described. 
236. Newburgh: A Parochial-School Teacher's Agreement. 



466 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

237. Saint Anne: Beginnings of an English Charity School. 

238. Regulations: Charity-School Organization and Instruction. 

(a) Qualifications for the Master. 
(h) Purpose and Instruction. 

239. Allen and McClure: Textbooks used in English Charity-Schools. 

240. England: A Charity-School Subscription Form. 

241. Southwark: The Charity-School of Saint John's Parish. 

242. Gorsham: An Eighteenth-Century Indenture of Apprenticeship. 

243. Indenture: Learning the Trade of a Schoolmaster. 

244. Diesterweg: The Schools of Germany before Pestalozzi. 

245. England: Free School Rules, 1734. 

246. Murray: A New Jersey School Lottery. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. State the main points in Mulcaster's scheme (226) for education. 

2. Characterize Locke's criticism (227) on the teaching of Latin. 

3. State Locke's ideas as to the use of the Bible (228). 

4. Characterize the nature and contents of the so-called "Spellers" by 
Coote and Dilworth (229). 

5. Compare the Connecticut common school, as described by Webster (230), 
with an Enghsh charity-school (238 b), or a Swedish popular school 
(232) of the time. 

6. Just what state of vernacular education in Teutonic lands is indicated 
by the three selections (231, 232, 233)? 

7. Compare the proprietary right of the teachers at Frankfort (233) with 
the right of control claimed over song schools by the Precentor of a medi- 
aeval cathedral (83). 

8. Do such conditions as Kriisi describes (234) exist anywhere to-day? 

9. Characterize the Dame School of England, as to instruction and control, 
from the descriptions given in the selections (235) reproduced. 

10. State the relationship of teacher and minister at Newburgh (236), and 
indicate the nature and probable extent of his income. 

11. State the purpose of the founders of Saint Anne of Soho (237), and 
characterize the type of school they created. 

12. What does the qualification for a charity-school teacher (238 a) indicate 
as to the nature of the teacher's caUing in such schools? Outline the 
instruction (238 b) in such a school. 

13. What instruction did the textbooks as printed (239) provide for? 

14. Show the voluntary and benevolent character of the charity-school by 
comparing the subscription form (240) with some voluntary subscrip- 
tion form used to-day. 

15. How did the school in Saint John's parish (241) differ from apprentice- 
ship training? 

16. What changes do you note between the mediaeval Indenture of Appren- 
ticeship (99) and the eighteenth-century Enghsh form (242)? 

17. Compare Readings 201 and 242 on apprenticeship. 

18. Compare conditions described in 244 with 231-233. 

iQ. What do the Free School Rules of 1734 (245) indicate as to duties and 

discipline? 
?o. What does the use of the lottery for school support (246) indicate as to 

the conception and scope of education at the time? 



THEORY AND PRACTICE BY 1750 467 



SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

/Allen, W. O. B., and McClure, E. Two Hundred Years; History of the 
S.P.C.K., 1698-18Q8. 
Barnard, Henry. English Pedagogy, Part ii, The Teacher in English 
Literature. 
-*Birchenough, C. History of Elementary Education in England and Wales, 
Brown, E. E. The Making of our Middle Schools. 
Cardwell, J. F. The Story of a Charity School. 
Davidson, Thos. Rousseau. 
*Earle, Alice M. Child Life in Colonial Days. 
Field, Mrs. E. M. The Child and his Book. 
Ford, Paul L. The New England Primer. 
Godfrey, Elizabeth. English Children in the Olden Time. 
*Johnson, Clifton. Old Time Schools and School Books. 
*Kemp, W. W. The Support of Schools in Colonial New York by the Society 
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. 
Kilpatrick, Wm. H. Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial New 

York. 
Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education (16Q3). 
*Montmorency, J. E. G. de. Progress of Education in England. 
Montmorency, J. E. G. de. State Intervention in English Education. 
Mulcaster, Richard. Positions. (London, 1581.) 
*Paulsen, Friedrich. German Education, Past and Present. 
*Salmon, David. "The Education of the Poor in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury"; reprinted from the Educational Record. (London, 1908.) 
*Scott, J. F. Historic Essays on Apprenticeship and Vocational Education, 
(Ann Arbor, 1914.) 



PART IV 
MODERN TIMES 

THE ABOLITION OF PRIVILEGE 

THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY 

^ NEW THEORY FOR EDUCATION EVOLVED 

THE STATE TAKES OVER THE SCHOOL 



CHAPTER XIX 
THE EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 

The eighteenth century a turning-point. The eighteenth cen- 
tury, in human thinking and progress, marks for most western 
nations the end of mediaevalism and the ushering-in of modern 
forms of intellectual hberty. The indifference to the old religious 
problems, which was clearly manifest in all countries at the be- 
ginning of the century, steadily grew and culminated in a revolt 
against ecclesiastical control over human affairs. This change in 
attitude toward the old proljlems permitted the rise of new types 
of intellectual inquiry, a rapid development of scientific thinking 
and discovery, the growth of a consciousness of national problems 
and national welfare, and the bringing to the front of secular 
interests to a degree practically unknown since the days of ancient 
Rome. In a sense the general rise of these new interests in the 
eighteenth century was but a culmination of a long series of move- 
ments looking toward greater intellectual freedom and needed 
human progress which had been under way since the days when 
studia generalia and guilds first arose in western Europe. The 
rise of the universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 
the Revival of Learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 
the Protestant Revolts in the skteenth, the rise of modern scien- 
tific inquiry in the sixteenth and seventeenth, and Puritanism in 
England and Pietism in Germany in the seventeenth, had all been 
in the nature of protests against the mediceval tendency to con- 
fine and Hmit and enslave the intellect. In the eighteenth cen- 
tury the culmination of this rising tide of protest came in a gen- 
eral and determined revolt against despotism in either Church or 
State, which, at the close of the century, swept away ancient priv- 
ileges, abuses, and barriers, and prepared the way for the marked 
intellectual and human and political progress which characterized 
the nineteenth century. 

Significance of the change in attitude. The new spirit and 
interests and attitudes which came to characterize the eighteenth 
century in the more progressive western nations meant the ulti- 
mate overthrow of the tyranny of mediaeval supernatural the- 
ology, the evolution of a new theory as to moral action which 



472 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

should be independent of theology, the freeing of the new scien- 
tific spirit from the fetters of church control, the substituting of 
new philosophical and scientific and economic interests for the 
old theological problems which had for so long dominated human 
thinking, the substitution of natural poUtical organization for the 
older ecclesiastical foundations of the State, the destruction of 
what remained of the old feudal poHtical system, the freeing of 
the serf and the evolution of the citizen, and the rise of a modern 
society interested in problems of national welfare — government 
in the interest of the governed, commerce, industry, science, eco- 
nomics, education, and social welfare. The evolution of such 
modern-type governments inevitably meant the creation of en- 
tirely new demands for the education of the people and for far- 
reaching political and social reforms. 

This new eighteenth-century spirit, which so characterized the 
mid-eighteenth century that it is often spoken of as the "Period 
of the EnUghtenment," ^ expressed itself in many new directions, 
a few of the more important of which will be considered here as 
of fundamental concern for the student of the history of educa- 
tional progress. In a very real sense the development of state 
educational systems, in both European and American States, has 
been an outgrowth of the great liberaHzing forces which first made 
themselves felt in a really determined way during this important 
transition century. In this chapter we shall consider briefly five 
important phases of this new eighteenth-century liberalism, as 
follows: 

1. The work of the benevolent despots of continental Europe in 
trying to shape their governments to harmonize them with the 
new spirit of the century. 

2. The unsatisfied demand for reform in France. 

3. The rise of democratic government and liberalism in England. 

4. The institution of constitutional government and religious free- 
dom in America. 

5. The sweeping away of mediaeval abuses in the great Revolution 
in France. 

^ "The Period of the Enlightenment" had two main aims: (i) the perfection of 
the individual, which gave a new emphasis to education, and (2) the mastery of 
man over his environment, which expressed itself through the new scientific studies. 
In German lands elementary education, a regenerated classical education, and the 
Realschule were the fruits of this period. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 473 



I. WORK OF THE BENEVOLENT DESPOTS OF CONTINENTAL 

EUROPE 

The new nationalism leads to interested government. In Eng- 
land, as we shall trace a little further on, a democratic form of 
government had for long been developing, but this democratic 
hfe had made but little headway on the continent of Europe. 
There, instead, the democratic tendencies which showed some 
sHght signs of development during the sixteenth century had been 
stamped out in the period of warfare and the ensuing hatreds of 
the seventeenth, and in the eighteenth century we find autocratic 
government at its height. National governments to succeed the 
earHer government of the Church had developed and grown 
strong, the kingly power had everywhere been consolidated, 
Church and State were in close working alliance, and the new 
spirit of nationahty — in government, foreign policy, languages, 
Hterature, and culture — was being energetically developed by 
those responsible for the welfare of the States. Everywhere, al- 
most, on the continent of Europe, the theory of the divine right 
of kings to rule and the divine duty of subjects to obey seemed to 
have become fixed, and this theory of government the Church now 
most assiduously supported. Unlike in England and the Ameri- 
can Colonies, the people of the larger countries of continental 
Europe had not as yet advanced far enough in personal liberty 
or political thinking to make any demand of consequence for the 
right to govern themselves. The new spirit of nationality abroad 
in Europe, though, as well as the new humanitarian ideas begin- 
ning to stir thinking men, alike tended to awaken a new interest 
on the part of many rulers in the welfare of the people they 
governed. In consequence, during the eighteenth century, we 
find a number of nations in which the rulers, putting themselves 
in harmony with the new spirit of the time, made earnest attempts 
to improve the condition of their peoples as a means of advancing 
the national welfare. We shall here mention the four nations in 
which the most conspicuous reform work was attempted. 

The rulers of Prussia. Three kings, to whom the nineteenth- 
century greatness of Prussia was largely due, ruled the country 
during nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. They were 
fully as despotic as the kings of France, but, unlike the French 
kings, they were keenly ahve to the needs of the people, anxious 
to advance the welfare of the State, tolerant in religion, and in 



474 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 145. Frederick 
THE Great 



sympathy with the new scientific studies. The first, Frederick 
William I (1713-40), labored earnestly to develop the resources 
of the country, trained a large army, ordered elementary education 

made compulsory, and made the begin- 
nings in the royal provinces of the trans- 
formation of the schools from the control 
of the Church to the control of the State. 
His son, known to history as Frederick 
the Great, ruled from 1740 to 1786. Dur- 
ing his long reign he labored continually 
to curtail ancient privileges, abolish old 
abuses, and improve the condition of his 
people. During the first week of his reign 
he abolished torture in trials, made the 
administration of law more equitable, 
instituted a limited freedom for the 
press, ^ and extended religious toleration. ^ 
He also partially abolished serfdom on the royal domains, and 
tried to uplift the peasantry and citizen classes, but in this he 
met with bitter opposition from the nobles of his realm. He 
built roads, canals, and bridges, encouraged skilled artisans to 
settle in his dominions, developed agriculture and industry, en- 
couraged scientific workers, extended an asylum to thousands of 
Huguenots fleeing from religious persecution in France,^ and did 
more than any previous ruler to provide common schools through- 
out his kingdom. By the general regulation of education in his 
kingdom (chapter xxii) he laid the foundations upon which the 
nineteenth-century Prussian school system was later built. 

His rule, though, was thoroughly autocratic. "Everything 
for the people, but nothing by the people," was the keynote of his 
policies. He had no confidence in the ability of the people to 
rule, and gave them no opportunity to learn the art. He em- 
ployed the strong army his father built up to wage wars of con- 
quest, seize territory that did not belong to him, and in conse- 

1 Frederick used to say that his subjects might think as they pleased so long as 
they behaved as he ordered. 

^ Though Prussia was primarily Lutheran, Catholics, Mennonites, Jews, and 
Huguenots early found a home in the kingdom. Frederick used to say that "all 
religions must be tolerated, for in this country every man must go to heaven in his 
own way." 

* After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (p. 301; 1685), over 20,000 French 
Huguenots — merchants, manufacturers, skilled workmen — found an asylum in 
Prussia alone. Settling in the Rhine countries, they contributed much to the future 
development of this regiou. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 475 



quence made himself a great German hero.^ He may be said to 
have laid the foundations of modern mihtarized, socialized, obedi- 
ently educated, and subject Germany, and also to have begun the 
"grand-larceny" and " scrap-of -paper " policy which has charac- 
terized Prussian international relationships ever since. Freder- 
ick William H, who reigned from 1786 to 1797, continued in large 
measure the enlightened policies of his uncle, reformed the tax 
system, lightened the burdens of his people, encouraged tradt, 
emphasized the German tongue, quickened the national spirit, 
actively encouraged schools and universities, and began that 
centralization of authority over the developing educational sys- 
tem which resulted in the creation in Prussia of the first modern 
state school system in Europe. The educational work of these 
three Prussian kings was indeed important, and we shall study it 
more in detail in a later chapter (chapter xxii). 

The Austrian reformers. Two notably benevolent rulers occu- 
pied the Austrian throne for half a centur>', and did much to 
improve the condition of the Austrian 
people. A very remarkable woman, Maria 
Theresa, came to the throne in 1 740, and 
was followed by her son, Joseph II, in 1 780. 
He ruled until 1790. To Maria Theresa 
the Austria of the nineteenth century owed 
most of its development and power. She 
worked with seemingly tireless energ\' for 
the advancement of the welfare of her sub- 
jects, and toward the close of her reign 
laid, as we shall see in a later chapter, the 
beginnings of Austrian school reiorm. 

Joseph II carried still further his moth- 
er's benevolent work, and strove to intro- 
duce " enlightenment and reason " into the 

administration of his realm. A student of the writings of the 
eighteenth-century reform philosophers, and deeply imbued with 
the reform spirit of his time, he attempted to abolish ancient 

^ " For the first time since Luther, the German people could call a great hero their 
own, whether they were the subjects of Frederick or not. Joyous pride in this prince, 
whose achievements in times of peace were no less than those in time of war, brought 
national consciousness to life again and this national feeling found expression in 
literature. It was the restoration of confidence in themselves that gave the Ger- 
mans the courage to break with French rules and French models, and to seek inde- 
pendently after ideals of beauty. And this self-confidence they owed to Frederick 
the Great." (Priest, G. M., History oj German Literature, d. ii6.) 




Fig. 146. 
Maria Theresa 



476 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

privileges, establish a uniform code of justice, encourage educa- 
tion, free the serfs, abolish feudal tenure, grant religious tolera- 
tion, curb the power of the Pope and the Church, break the power 
of the local Diets, centralize the State, and "introduce a uniform 
level of democratic simplicity under his own absolute sway." He 
attempted to alter the organization of the Church, abolished six 
hundred monasteries,^ and reduced the number of monastic per- 
sons in his dominion from 63,000 to 27,000. Attempting too 
much, he brought down upon his head the wrath of both priest 
and noble and died a disappointed man. The abolition of feudal 
tenure and serfdom on the distinctively Austrian lands, of all his 
attempted reforms, alone was permanent. His work stands as 
an interesting commentary on the temporary character of the 
results which follow attempts rapidly to improve the conditions 
surrounding the lives of people, without at the same time edu- 
cating the people to improve themselves. 

The Spanish reformers. A very similar result attended the 
reform efforts of a succession of benevolent rulers thrust upon 
Spain, during the eighteenth century, by the complications of for- 
eign politics. Over a period of nearly ninety years, extending 
from the accession of Philip V (1700) to the death of Charles HI 
(1788), remarkable political progress was imposed by a succession 
of able ministers and with the consent of the kings. ^ The power 
of the Church, always the crying evil of Spain, was restricted in 
many ways; the Inquisition was curbed; the Jesuits were driven 
from the kingdom; the burning of heretics was stopped; prosecu- 
tion for heresy was reduced and discouraged; the monastic orders 
were taught to fear the law and curb their passions; evils in public 
administration were removed; national grievances were redressed; 
the civil service was improved; science and literature were en- 
couraged, in place of barren theological speculations ; and an ear- 
nest effort was made to regenerate the national life and improve 
the lot of the common people. 

All these reforms, though, were imposed from above, and no 
attempt was made to introduce schools or to educate the people 
in the arts of self-government. The result was that the reforms 
never went beneath the surface, and the national life of the peo- 

' Though Joseph II claimed to be a good Catholic, he felt that monasticism had 
outlived its usefulness as an institution, and that its continuance was inimical to the 
interests of organized society and the State. This view has since been taken by the 
rulers of every progressive modern nation. 

2 The Cortes, or National Parliament, met but three times during the century, 
and when it did meet possessed but few powers and exercised but little influence. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 477 

pie remained largely untouched. Within five years of the death 
of Charles III all had been lost. Under a native Spanish king, 
thoroughly orthodox, devout, and lacking in any broad national 
outlook, the Church easily restored itself to power, the priests 
resumed their earlier importance, the nobles again began to exact 
their full toll, free discussion was forbidden, scientific studies 
were abandoned, the universities were ordered to discontinue the 
study of moral philosophy, and the political and social reforms 
which had required three generations to build up were lost in 
half a decade. Not meeting any well-expressed need of the peo- 
ple, and with no schools provided to show to the people the de- 
sirable nature of the reforms introduced, it was easy to sweep 
them aside. In this relapse to media^valism, the chance for 
Spain — a country rich in possibilities and natural resources — 
to evolve early into a progressive modern nation was lost. So 
Spain has remained ever since, and only in the last quarter of a 
century has reform from within begun to be evident in this until 
recently priest-ridden and benighted land. 

The intelligent despots of Russia. The greatest of these were 
Peter the Great, who ruled from 1689 to 1725, and Catherine II, 
who ruled from 1762 to 1796. Catching something of the new 
eighteenth-century western spirit, these rulers tried to introduce 
some western enlightenment into their as yet almost barbarous 
land. Each tried earnestly to lift their people to a higher level 
of living, and to start them on the road toward civilization and 
learning. By a series of edicts, despotically enforced, Peter tried 
to introduce the civJhzation of the western world into his country. 
He brought in numbers of skilled artisans, doctors, merchants, 
teachers, printers, and soldiers; introduced many western skills 
and trades; and made the beginnings of western secondary edu- 
cation for the governing classes by the estabhshment in the cities 
of a number of German-type gymnasia.'^ Later Catherine II had 
the French philosopher Diderot (p. 482) draw up a plan for her 
for the organization of a state system of higher schools, but the 
plan was never put into effect. The beginnings of Russian higher 
civilization really date from this eighteenth-century work. The 
power of the formidable Greek or Eastern Church remained, how- 
ever, untouched, and this continued, until after the Russian revo- 
lution of 191 7, as one of the most serious obstacles to Russian 

^ The first Russian university was established at Kiev, in 1588; the second at 
Dorpat, in 1632; the third at Moscow, in 1755; and the fourth at Kasan, in 1804. 
The University of Petrograd dates from 1819. 



478 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

intellectual and educational progress. The serfs, too, remained 
serfs — tied to the land, ignorant, superstitious, and obedient. 

By the close of the eighteenth century Russia, largely under 
Prussian training, had become a very formidable military power, 
and by the close of the nineteenth century was beginning to make 
some progress of importance in the arts of peace. Just at present 
Russia is going through a stage of national evolution quite com- 
parable to that which took place in France a century and a quar- 
ter ago, and the educational importance of this great people, as 
we shall point out further on, lies in their future evolution rather 
than in any contribution they have as yet made to western 
development. 

II. THE UNSATISFIED DEMAND FOR REFORM IN FRANCE 

The setting of eighteenth-century France. Eighteenth-century 
France, on the contrary, developed no benevolent despot to miti- 
gate abuses, reform the laws, abolish privileges, temper the rule 
of the Church,^ (R. 247), curb the monastic orders, develop the 
natural resources, begin the establishment of schools, and allevi- 
ate the hard lot of the serf and the peasant. There, instead, 
absolute monarchy in Europe reached its most complete triumph 
during the long reigns of Louis XIV (1643-17 15) and Louis XV 
(1715-74), and the splendor of the court Hfe of France captivated 
all Europe and served to hide the misery which made the splendor 
possible. There the power of the nobles had been completely 
broken, and the power of the parUaments completely destroyed. 
"I am the State," exclaimed Louis XIV, and the almost unHmited 
despotism of the King and his ministers and favorites fully sup- 
ported the statement. Local liberties had been suppressed, and 
the lot of the common people — ignorant, hard-working, down- 
trodden, but intensely patriotic — ■ was wretched in the extreme. 
Approximately 140,000 nobles ^ and 130,000 monks, nuns, and 
clergy owned two fifths of the landed property of France, and 
controlled the destinies of a nation of approximately 25,000,000 
people. Agriculture was the great industry of the time, but this 

^ The great difference between a church and true religion must always be kept in 
mind. Religion is a thing of the spirit, and its principle represents the loftiest 
thoughts of the race; a church is a human governing institution, and clearly subject 
to its own ambitions and the human frailties of its age. 

'^ That is, 25,000 to 30,000 famihes. There were also, in even numbers, 83,000 
monks in 2500 monasteries (one for every ninety square miles in France), 37,000 
nuns in 1500 convents, and 60,000 priests. Of the soil of France, the King and 
towns owned one fifth, the clergy and the monks one fifth, the nobility one fifth, the 
bourgeoisie one fifth, and the peasantry one fifth. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 479 

was so taxed by the agents of King and Church that over one half 
of the net profits from farming were taken for taxation. 

Church and State were in close working alliance. The higher 
offices of the Church were commonly held by appointed noblemen, 
who drew large incomes/ led worldly lives, and neglected their 
priestly functions much as the Italian appointees in German 
lands had done before the Reformation. Between the nobles and 
upper clergy on the one hand and the peasant-born lower clergy 
and the masses of the people on the other a great gulf existed. 
The real brains of France were to be found among a small bour- 
geois class of bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, minor officials, 
lawyers, and skilled artisans, who lived in the cities and who, 
ambitious and discontented, did much to stimulate the increasing 
unrest and demand for reform which in time pervaded the whole 
nation. A king, constantly in need of increasing sums of money; 
an idle, selfish, corrupt, and discredited nobihty and upper clergy, 
incapable of aiding the king, many of whom, too, had been influ- 
enced by the new philosophic and scientific thinking and were 
willing to help destroy their own orders; an aggressive, discon- 
tented, and patriotic bourgeoisie, full of new political and social 
ideas, and patriotically anxious to reform France; and a vast 
unorganized peasantry and city rabble, suffering much and 
resisting Uttle, but capable of a terrible fury and senseless 
destruction, once they were aroused and their suppressed rage 
let loose ; — these were the main elements in the setting of 
eighteenth-century France. 

The French reform philosophers. During the middle decades 
of the eighteenth century a small but very influential group of 
reform philosophers in France attacked with their pens the an- 
cient abuses in Church and State, and did much to pave the way 
for genuine poHtical and religious reform. In a series of widely 
read articles and books, characterized for the most part by clear 
reasoning and telhng arguments, these political philosophers 
attacked the power of the absolute monarchy on the one hand, 
and the existing privileges of the nobles and clergy on the other, 
as both unjust and inimical to the welfare of society (R. 248). 
The leaders in the reform movement were Montesquieu (1689- 

1 In 1788 the 131 bishops and archbishops of France had an average income of 
100,000 francs, and S3 abbots and 27 abbesses had incomes ranging from 80,000 to 
500,000 francs. The Cardinal de Rohan, Archbishop of Strasbourg, had an income 
of more than 1,000,000 francs, and the 300 Benedictine monks at Cluny had an 
incoRie of more than 1,800,000 francs. 



480 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 147. Montesquieu 
(1689-1755) 



1755), Turgot (1727-81), Voltaire (1694-1778), Diderot (1713-84)^ 
and Rousseau (1712-78), 

Montesquieu. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's famous book, 
the Spirit of Laws. In this he pointed out the many excellent 
features of the constitutional government 
which the English had developed, and 
compared English conditions with the 
many abuses to which the French people 
were subject. He argued that laws 
should be expressive of the wishes and 
needs of the people governed, and that 
the education of a people "ought to be 
relative to the principles of good gov- 
ernment." Montesquieu also stands, with 
Turgot as the founder of the sciences 
of comparative politics ^ and the phi- 
losophy of liistory — new studies which 
helped to shape the political thinking 
of eighteenth-century France. 

Turgot. Two years after the publi- 
cation of Montesquieu's book, Turgot delivered (1750) a series 
of lectures at the Sorbonne, in Paris, in which he virtually cre- 
ated the science of history. Looking at human history compre- 
hensively, seeing clearly that there had been a hitherto unrecog- 
nized regularity of march amid the confusion of the past, and that 
it was possible to grasp the history of the progress of man as a 
whole, he saw and stated the possibiHty of society to improve 
itself through intelligent government, and the need for wise 
laws and general education to enable it to do so.^ 

1 "The real importance of Esprit des lots is not that of a formal treatise on law, or 
even on polity. It is that of an assemblage of the most fertile, original, and in- 
spiriting views on legal and political subjects, put in language of singular suggestive- 
ness and vigour, illustrated by examples which are always apt and luminous, per- 
meated by the spirit of temperate and tolerant desire for human improvement and 
happiness, and almost unique in its entire freedom at once from doctrinairism, vision- 
ary enthusiasm, egotism, and an undue spirit of system. The genius of the author 
for generalization is so great, his instinct in pohtical science so sure, that even the 
falsity of his premises frequently fails to vitiate his conclusions." (Saintsbury, 
George, in Encydopcedia Britannka, vol. xviii, p. 777.) 

2 "By the captivating prospects which he held out of future progress, and by the 
picture which he drew of the capacity of society to improve itself, Turgot increased 
the impatience which his countrymen were beginning to feel against the despotic 
government, in whose presence amelioration seemed to be hopeless. These, and 
similar speculations of the time, stimulated the activity of the intellectual classes, 
cheered them under the persecutions to which they were exposed, and emboldened 
them to attack the institutions of their native land." (Buckle, H. T., History oj 
Civilization in England, vol. i, p. 597.) 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 481 



In 1774 Turgot was appointed Minister of Finance by the new 
King, Louis XVI, and during the two years before he was removed 





Fig. 14S. Turcot 
(1727-81) 



Fig. 149. Voltaire 
(1694-1778) 



from office he attempted to carry out many needed political and 
social reforms. Duruy ^ has summarized his suggested reforms 
as follows: 

1. Gradual introduction of a complete system of local self-govern- 
ment. 

2. Imposition of a land tax on nobility and clergy. 

3. Suppression of the greater part of the monasteries. 

4. Amelioration of the condition of the minor clergy. 

5. Equalization of the burdens of taxation. 

6. Liberty of conscience, and the recall of the Protestants to France. 

7. A uniform system of weights and measures. 

8. Freedom for commerce and industry. 
A single and uniform code of laws. 

A vast plan for the organization of a system of public instruction 
throughout France. 

This list is indicative of the reform philosophy in the light of 
which he worked. Arousing the natural hostiUty of the nobility 
and higher clergy, he was soon dismissed, and the reforms he had 
proposed were abandoned by the King. 

Voltaire. The keenest and most unsparing critic of the old 

order was Voltaire. In clear and forceful French he exposed 

existing conditions in society and government, and particularly 

the control of affairs exercised by the most ancient and most 

^ Duruy, V., History of France, p. 523. 



9 

ID 



482 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



powerful organization of his day — the Church. For this he was 
execrated and hated by the clergy, and in return he made it the 
chief task of his Ufe to destroy the reign of the priest. Having 
lived for a time in England, he appreciated the vast difference 
between the English and French forms of government. With a 
keen and unsparing pen he exposed the scholasticism, despotism, 
dogmatism, superstition, hypocrisy, servility, and deep injustice 
of his age, and poured out the vials of his scorn upon the grubbing 
pedantry of the Academicians who doted upon the past because 
ignorant of the present. In particular he stood for the abolition 
of that reHc of feudalism — serfdom — which still seriously op- 
pressed the peasantry of France ; for liberty in thought and action 
for the individual; for curbing the powers and privileges of both 
State and Church; for an equalization of the burdens of taxation 
between the different classes in French society; and for the organ- 
ization of a system of public education throughout the nation. He 
died before the outbreak of the Revolution he had done so much to 
bring about, but by the time he died the "Ancient Regime" of 
privilege and corruption and oppression was already tottering to 
its fall. His conception of the relations that should exist between 
Church and State are well set forth in a short article from his pen 
on the subject (R. 248) reprinted from the Encyclopixdia of Diderot. 
Diderot. Another able thinker and writer was Diderot. Be- 
sides other works of importance, he gave twenty years of his life 
(1751-72) to the editing (with D Alembert) 
of an Encyclo pcEdia of seventeen volumes 
of text and eleven of plates. Many of the 
articles were written by himself, and were 
expressive of his ideas as to reform. Many 
were frankly critical of existing privileges, 
abuses, and pretensions. Many interpreted 
to the French the science of Newton and 
the discoveries of the age, and awakened 
a new interest in scientific study. Because 
of its reform ideas the publication was sup- 
pressed, in 1759, after the publication of 
the seventh volume, and had to be carried 
on surreptitiously thereafter. Viscount Morley, writing recently 
on Diderot, summarizes the nature and influence of the Encyclo- 
pedia in the following words: 

The ecclesiastical party detested the Encyclopcedia, in which they 




Fig. 150. Diderot 
(1713-84) 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 483 

saw a rising stronghold for their philosophical enemies. To any one 
who turns over the pages of these redoubtable volumes now, it seems 
surprising that their doctrine should have stirred such portentous 
alarm. There is no atheism, no overt attack on any of the cardinal 
mysteries of the faith, no direct denunciation even of the notorious 
abuses of the Church. Yet we feel that the atmosphere of the book 
may well have been displeasing to authorities who had not yet learnt 
to encounter the modern spirit on equal terms. The Encydopcedia 
takes for granted the justice of religious toleration and speculative 
freedom. It asserts in distinct tones the democratic doctrine that it is 
the common people in a nation whose lot ought to be the chief concern 
of the nation's government. From beginning to end it is one unbroken 
process of exaltation of scientific knowledge on the one hand, and 
pacific industry on the other. All these things were odious to the old 
governing classes of France.^ 

Rousseau. The fifth reform writer mentioned as exercising 
a large influence was Rousseau. In 1749 the Academy at Dijon 
offered a prize for the best essay on the subject : Has the progress 
oj the sciences and arts contributed to corrupt or to purify morals? 
Rousseau took the negative side and won the prize. His essay 
attracted widespread attention. In 1753 he competed for a 
second prize on The Origin of Inequality among Men, in which he 
took the same negative attitude. In 1762 appeared both his 
Social Contract and Emile. In the former he contended that 
early men had given to selected leaders the right to conduct their 
government for them, and that these had in time become auto- 
cratic and had virtually enslaved the people (R. 249 a). He held 
that men were not bound to submit to government against their 
wills, and to remedy existing abuses he advocated the overthrow 
of the usurping government and the establishment of a republic, 
with universal suffrage based on "liberty, fraternity, and equal- 
ity." The ideal State lay in a society controlled by the people, 
where artificiality and aristocracy and the tyranny of society over 
man did not exist. Nor could Rousseau distinguish between 
political and ecclesiastical tyranny, holding that the former 
inevitably followed from the latter (R. 249 b). 

Crude as were his theories, and impractical as were many of 
his ideas, to an age tired of absurdities and pretensions and injus- 
tice, and suffering deeply from the abuses of both Church and 
State, his attractively written book seemed almost inspired. The 
Social Contract virtually became the Bible of the French Revolu- 
tionists. In the Emile, a book which will be referred to more at 

^ Encyclopcedia Britannica, nth ed., vol. viii, p. 204. 



484 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

length in chapter XXI, Rousseau held that we should revert, in 
education, to a state of nature to secure the needed educational 
reforms, and that education to prepare for life in the existing 
society was both wrong and useless, 

A revolution in French thinking. These five men — Montes- 
quieu, Turgot, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau — and many 
other less influential followers, portrayed the abuses of the time 
in Church and State and pointed out the lines of poUtical and 
ecclesiastical reform. Those who read their writings understood 
better why the existing privileges of the nobility and clergy were 
no longer right, and the need for reform in matters of taxation 
and government. Their writings added to the spirit of unrest 
of the century, and were deeply influential, not only in France, 
but in the American Colonies as well. Though the attack was 
at first against the evils in Church and State, the new critical 
philosophy soon led to intellectual developments of importance 
in many other directions. 

At the death of Louis XIV (17 15) France was intellectually 
prostrate. Great as was his long reign from the point of view of 
the splendor of his court, and large as was the quantity of litera- 
ture produced, his age was nevertheless an age of misery, religious 
intolerance, political oppression, and intellectual decline. It was 
a reign of centralized and highly personal government. Men no 
longer dared to think for themselves, or to discuss with any free- 
dom questions either of poHtics or reHgion. ''There was no popu- 
lar liberty; there were no great men; there was no science; there 
was no literature; there were no arts. The largest intellects lost 
their energy; the national spirit died away." Between the death 
of Louis XIV and the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789) 
an intellectual revolution took place in France, and for this revo- 
lution English political progress and political and scientific think- 
ing were largely responsible. 

Great English influence on France. In 1715 the EngHsh lan- 
guage was almost unspoken in France, English science and polit- 
ical progress were unknown there, and the English were looked 
down upon and hated. Half a century later English was spoken 
everywhere by the scholars of the time; the English were looked 
upon as the political and scientific leaders of Europe; and the 
scholars of France visited England to study English political, 
economic, and scientific progress. Locke, an uncompromising 
advocate of poHtical and religious liberty; Hobbes, the specula- 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 485 

tive moral philosopher; and the great scientist Newton were the 
teachers of Voltaire. More than any other single man, Voltaire 
moulded and redirected eighteenth-century thought in France.^ 
Numerous French writers of importance — Helvetius, Diderot, 
Morellet, Voltaire, Rousseau, to mention but a few — drew their 
inspiration from Enghsh writers. In the eighteenth century Eng- 
land became the school for political liberty for France.^ 

The effect of the work of Isaac Newton (p. 388), as popularized 
by the writings of Voltaire, was revolutionary on a people who 
had been so tyrannized over by the clergy as had the French 
during the reign of Louis XIV. An interest in scientific studies 
before unknown in France now flamed up, and a new generation 
of French scientists arose. Physics, chemistry, zoology, and anat- 
omy received a great new impetus, while botany, geology, and 
mineralogy were raised to the rank of sciences. Popular scien- 
tific lectures became very common. The classics were almost 
abandoned for the new studies. 

Economic questions now also began to be discussed, such as 
questions of money, food, finance, and government expenditure. 
In 1776 the Englishman, Adam Smith, laid the foundations of 
the new science of political economy by the publication of his 
Wealth of Nations, and this was at once translated into French 
and eagerly read. In 1781 a French banker by the name of 
Necker pubHshed his Compte Rendu, a statistical report on the 
finances of France. So feverishly eager were men to study prob- 
lems of government that six thousand copies were sold the day it 
was published, and eighty thousand had to be printed before the 
demand for it was satisfied, A half-century earher it would have 
been read scarcely at all. 

^ "The real king of the eighteenth century was Voltaire; but Voltaire, in his turn, 
was a pupil of the English. Before Voltaire became acquainted with England, 
through his travels and his friendships, he was not Voltaire, and the eighteenth 
century was still undeveloped." (Cousin, History of Philosophy.) 

^ "The first Frenchmen who in the eighteenth century turned their attention to 
England were amazed at the boldness with which, in that country, political and 
religious questions of the deepest moment were discussed — questions which no 
Frenchman in the preceding age had dared to broach. With wonder they discov- 
ered in England a comparative freedom of the public press, and saw with astonish- 
ment how in Parliament itself the government of the Crown was attacked with 
impunity, and the management of its revenues actually kept under control. To see 
the civilization and prosperity of England increasing, while the power of the upper 
classes and the King diminished, was to them a revelation. . . . England, said Helve- 
tius, is a country where the people are respected, a country where each citizen has z. 
part in the management of affairs, where men of genius are allowed to enhghten the 
public upon its true interests." (Dabney, R. H., Causes of the French Revolution. 
p. 141.) 



486 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

In the meantime taxes piled up, reforms were refused, the 
power and arrogance of the clergy and nobility showed no signs 
of diminution, the nation was burdened with debt, commerce and 
agriculture declined, the lot of the common people became ever 
more hard to bear, and the masses grew increasingly resentful 
and rebellious. As national affairs continued to drift from bad 
to worse in France, a series of important happenings on the 
American continent helped to bring matters more rapidly to a 
crisis. Before describing these events, however, we wish to 
sketch briefly the rise of government by the people and the ex- 
tension of liberalism in England — the first great democratic na- 
tion of the western world. 

III. ENGLAND THE FIRST DEMOCRATIC NATION 

Early beginnings of English liberty. The first western nation 
created from the wreck of the Roman Empire to achieve a meas- 
urement of self-government was England. Better civilized than 
most of the other wandering tribes, at the time of their coming 
to Enghsh shores, the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes early 
accepted Christianity (p. 120) and settled down to an agricultural 
life. On English shores they soon built up a for-the-time substan- 
tial civilization. This was later largely destroyed by the pillaging 
Danes, but with characteristic energy the English set to work to 
assimilate the newcomers and build up civilization anew. The 
work of Alfred (p. 146) in reestablishing law and order, at a time 
when law and order scarcely existed anywhere in western Europe, 
will long remain famous. Later on, and at a time when German 
and Hun and Slav had only recently accepted Christianity in 
name and had begun to settle down into rude tribal governments 
(p. 120), the Enghsh barons were extorting Magna Charta from 
King John and laying the firm foundations of Enghsh constitu- 
tional liberty. In the meadow at Runnymede, on that justly 
celebrated June day, in 12 15, government under law and based 
on the consent of the governed began to shape itself once more 
in the western world. Of the sixty-three articles of this Charter 
of Liberties, three possess imperishable value. These provided : 

1. That no free man shall be imprisoned or proceeded against except 
by his peers, or the law of the land, which secured trial by jury. 

2. That justice should neither be sold, denied, nor delayed. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 487 

3. That dues from the people to the king could be imposed only with 
the consent of the National Council (after 1 246 known as Parlia- 
ment). 

So important was this charter to such a liberty-loving people as 
the English have always been, and so bitterly did kings resent its 
hampering provisions, that within the next two centuries kings 
had been forced to confirm it no less than thirty-seven times. 

By 1295 the first complete Parliament, representative of the 
three orders of society — Lords, Clergy, and Commons — assem- 
bled, and in 1333 the Commons gained the right to sit by itself. 
From that time to the present the Commons, representing the 
people, has gradually broadened its powers, working, as Tenny- 
son has said,^ "from precedent to precedent," until to-day it rules 
the English nation. In 1376 the Commons gained the right to 
impeach the King's ministers, and in 1407 the exclusive right to 
make grants of money for any govermnental purpose. Centuries 
ahead of other nations, this insured an almost continual meeting 
of the national assembly and a close scrutiny of the acts of both 
kings and ministers. 

In 1604 King James I, imitating continental European prece- 
dents, proclaimed his theory as to the "divine right of kings" to 
rule,^ and a struggle at once set in which carried the English into 
Civil War (1642-49); led to the beheading of Charles I (1649); 
the overthrow and banishment of James II (1688); and the ulti- 
mate firm establishment, instead, of the "divine right of the 
common people.'' ^ In an age when the autocratic power and the 

^ Tennyson, in his "You ask me why," well describes the growth of constitutional 
liberty in England when he says that England is : 

"A land of settled government, 
A land of just and old renown, 
Where freedom broadens slowly down, 
From precedent to precedent." 

2 James I, in 1604, had declared: "As it is atheism to dispute what God can do, 
so it is presumption and a high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do." 
For this attitude the Commons continually contested his authority, his son lost his 
crown and his head, and his grandson was driven from the throne and from England. 
By contrast, and as showing the different attitude toward self-government of the 
two peoples, the German Emperor William II, three centuries later, so continually 
boasted of his rule by divine right that "Me and God" became an international 
joke, and to his assumption the German people took little or no exception. 

' The passage of the Bill of Rights (1689) ended the divine-right-of-kings idea in 
England for all time. This prohibited the King from keeping a standing army in 
times of peace, gave every subject the right to petition for a redress of grievances, 
gave Parliament the right of free debate, prohibited the King from interfering in 
any way with the proper execution of the laws, declared that members ought to be 
elected to Parliament without interference, and gave the Commons control of all 
forms of taxation. 



488 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

divine right of kings to rule was almost unquestioned elsewhere 
in Europe, the English people compelled their king to recognize 
that he could rule over them only when he ruled in their interests 
and as they wished him to do. Though there was a period of 
struggle later on with the Hanoverian Georges (I, II, and III) , and 
especially with the honest but stupid George III, England has, 
since 1688, been a government of and by the people.^ France 
did not rid itself of the "divine-right" conception until the French 
Revolution (1789), and Germany, Austria, and Russia not until 
1918. 

Growth of tolerance among the English. The results of the 
long struggle of the English for liberty under law showed itself 
in many ways in the growth of tolerance among the people of the 
English nation. At a time when other nations were bound down 
in blind obedience to king and priest, and when dissenting minori- 
ties were driven from the land, the English people had become 
accustomed to the idea of individual liberty, regulated by law, 
and to the toleration of opinions with which they did not agree. 
These characteristically English conceptions of liberty under law 
and of the toleration of minorities have found expression in many 
important ways in the Ufe and government of the people (R. 250), 
and have been elements of great strength in England's colonial 
poHcy. One of the important ways in which this growth of toler- 
ance among the English showed itself was in the extension of a 
larger freedom to those unable to subscribe to the state religion. 

Though the Reformation movement had stirred up bitter 
hatreds in England, as on the Continent, the English were among 
the first of European peoples to show tolerance of opposition in 
religious matters. The high English State Church, which had 
succeeded the Roman, had made but small appeal to many Eng- 
lishmen. The Puritans had early struggled to secure a simplifi- 
cation of the church service and the introduction of more preach- 
i^^g (P- 359)? and in the seventeenth century the organization of 
three additional dissenting sects, which became known as Unitari- 
ans, Baptists, and Quakers, took place. These sects divided off 
rather quietly, and their separation resulted only in the enact- 
ment of new laws regarding conformity, prayers, and teaching. 

^ Though the English first developed regulated or constitutional government, 
they themselves have no single written constitution. Instead, the foundations of 
English constitutional government rest on Magna Charta (12 15), the Petition of 
Rights (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689), these three constituting "the Bible of 
English Liberty." 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 489 



During the latter half of the seventeenth century, after the 
execution of Charles I (1649), the Puritans had temporarily risen 
to power, and during their control of affairs had imposed their 
strict Calvinistic standards as to Sabbath observance and piety 
on the nation. This was very distasteful to many, and from such 
strict observances the people in time rebelled. The standards 
of the English in personal morality, temperance, amusements, 
and manners at the beginning of the eighteenth century were not 
especially high, and in the reaction from Puritan control and 
strict religious observances the great mass of the people degen- 
erated into positive irrehgion and gross immorality. Drunken- 
ness, rowdyism, robbery, blasphemy, brutality, lewdness, and 
prostitution became very common. This moral decline of the 
people the Church of England seemed powerless to arrest. 

About 1730 a reform movement was begun under the able 
leadership of a young Oxford student by the name of John Wesley, 
ably seconded by George Whitefield (1714- 
70), with a view to reaching the classes so 
completely untouched by the high State 
Church. By traveling over the country and 
preaching a gospel of repentance, personal 
faith, and better living, these two young 
men made a deep emotional appeal, and 
soon gained a strong hold on the poorer and 
more ignorant classes of the people. For- 
bidden to preach in Anglican churches, and 
at times threatened with personal violence, 
these two men were in time forced into open 
rebellion against the Established Church. 
Finally they founded a new Church, which 
became known as the Methodist.^ This 
new organization bore the same relation to 
the Church of England that the AngUcan Church two hundred 
years before had borne to the Church of Rome. Thus was ac- 
compHshed a second spiritual reformation in England, and one 
destined in time to spread to the colonies and deeply affect the 
lives of a large portion of the English people.^ That such a well- 

1 At first used as a term of ridicule, from the very methodical manner in which 
the Wesleyans organized their campaigns. 

^ "If we except the great Puritan movement of the seventeenth century, no such 
appeal had been heard since the days when Augustine and his band of monks landed 
in Kent and set forth on their mission among the barbarous Saxons. The results 
answered fully to the zea! that awakened them. Better than the growing prosper- 




FiG. 151. John Wesley 

(1707-82) 
Founder of Methodism 



490 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

organized sect could arise, such a moral reformation be preached; 
and the power of the Established Church be challenged so openly 
and without serious persecution, speaks much for the growth of 
religious tolerance among the English people since the days of 
the great Elizabeth. In 1778 the Roman Catholic Relief Act was 
adopted, and in 1779 dissenting ministers and schoomiasters were 
relieved from the disabilities under which they had so long re- 
mained. These acts indicate a further marked growth in reli- 
gious tolerance on the part of the English nation.^ 

New emancipating and educative influences. In 1662 the first 
regular newspaper outside of Italy was established in England, 
and in 1702 the first daily paper. Small in size, printed on 
but one side of the sheet, and dealing wholly with local matters, 
these nevertheless marked the beginnings of that daily expression 
of popular opinion with which we are now so familiar.^ After 
about 1705 the cheap political pamphlet made its appearance, 
and after 1 7 10, instead of merely communicating news, the papers 
began the discussion of political questions. 

By 1735 a revolution had been effected in England, and papers 
and presses began to be established in the chief cities and towns 
outside of London; the freedom of the press was in a large way 

ity of extending commerce, better than all the conquests of the East or the West, 
was the new religious spirit which stirred the people of both England and America, 
and provoked the National Church to emulation in good works — which planted 
schools, checked intemperance, and brought into vigorous activity all that was best 
and bravest in a race that when true to itself is excelled by none." (Montgomery, 
D. H., English History, p. 322.) 

1 The contrast between eighteenth-century England and France, in the matter of 
religious liberty, is interesting. In France the Church took care, during the whole 
of the eighteenth century, that the persecution process should go on. "In 1717 an 
assembly of seventy-four Protestants having been surprised at Andure, the men 
were sent to the galleys and the women to prison. An edict of 1724 declared that 
all who took part in a Protestant meeting, or who had any direct or indirect com- 
munication with a Protestant preacher, should have their heads shaved and be im- 
prisoned for life, and the men condemned to perpetual servitude in the galleys. Iiv 
1745 and 1746, in the province of Dauphine, 277 Protestants were condemned to 
the galleys and a number of women flogged. From 1744 to 1752 six hundred Prot- 
estants in the east and south of France were condemned to various punishments. 
In 1774 the children of a Calvinistof Rennes were taken from him. Up to the verj- 
eve of the Revolution Protestant ministers were hanged in Languedoc, and dragoons 
were sent against their congregations." (Dabney, R. H., Causes oj the French 
Revolution, p. 42.) 

2 Back as early as 1695 the Commons had refused to renew the press-licensing 
act, enacted in 1637, to control heresy. This had confined printing to London, 
Oxford, and Cambridge, and to twenty master printers and four letter founders for 
the realm. This refusal marks the beginning of the freedom of the press in England. 
In 1709 the copyright law was enacted, and in 1776 the redress against pubHshers 
of libelous articles was confined to the ordinary courts of law. A century ahead 
of France, and more than two centuries ahead' of Teutonic and Romanic laxidi^ 
England provided for a free press and open discussion. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 491 

completed, and newspapers, for the first time in the history of the 
world, were made the exponents of public opinion. The press in 
England in consequence became an educative force of great intel- 
lectual and political importance, and did much to compensate 
for the lack of a general system of schools for the people. In 1772 
the right to publish the debates in Parhament was finally won, 
over the strenuous objections^ of George III. In 1780 the first 
' Sunday newspaper appeared, "on the only day the lower orders 
^had time to read a paper at all," and, despite the efforts of reli- 
gious bodies to suppress it, the Sunday paper has continued to 
the present and has contributed its quota to the education and 
enlightenment of mankind. In 1785 the famous London Times 
began to appear. In the middle of the eighteenth century de- 
bating societies for the consideration of pubHc questions arose, 
and in 1769 "the first public meeting ever assembled in England, 
in which it was attempted to enlighten Englishmen respecting 
their political rights" was held, and such meetings soon became 
of almost daily occurrence. All these influences stimulated polit- 
ical thinking to a high degree, and contributed not only to a 
desire for still larger political freedom but for the more general 
diffusion of the ability to read as well (R. 250). 

Still other important new influences arose during the early part 
of the eighteenth century, each of which tended to awaken new 
desires for schools and learning. In 1678 the first modern printed 
story to appeal to the masses, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, ap- 
peared from the press. Written, as it had been, by a man of the 
people, its simple narrative form, its passionate religious feeling, 
its picture of the Journey of a pilgrim through a world of sin and 
temptation and trial, and its Biblical language with which the 
common people had now become familiar — all these elements 
combined to make it a book that appealed strongly to all who 
read or heard it read, and stimulated among the masses a desire 
to read comparable to that awakened by the chaining of the 
English Bible in the churches a century before (R. 170). In 17 19 
the first great English novel, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and in 
1726 Gulliver's Travels, added new stimulus to the desires awak- 
ened by Bunyan's book. All three were books of the common 

^ George III, always consistently wrong, opposed this extension of popular rights. 
In 1771 he wrote the Prime Minister, Lord North: "It is highly necessary that this 
strange and lawless method of publishing debates in the papers should be put a stop 
to. But is not the House of Lords the best court to bring such miscreants before; 
as it can fine, as well as imprison, and has broader shoulders to suDDort the odiiuu 
of ao salutary a measure." 



492 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

people, whereas the dramas, plays, essays, and scholarly works 
previously produced had appealed only to a small educated class. 
In 1 75 1 what was probably the first circulating Ubrary of modern 
times was opened at Birmingham, and soon thereafter similar 
institutions were established in other EngUsh cities. 

Science and manufacturing; the new era. England, too, from 
the first, showed an interest in and a tolerance toward the new 
;scientific thinking scarcely found in any other land. This in 
itself is indicative of the great intellectual progress which the 
English people had by this time made.^ At a time when Gafileo, 
in Italy (p. 388), was fighting, almost alone, for the right to think 
.along the Hues of the new scientific method and being imprisoned 
;for his pains, Englishmen were reading with deep interest the 
(epoch-making scientific writings of Lord Francis Bacon (p. 390). 
EarUer than in other lands, too, the Newtonian philosophy found 
a place in the instruction of the national universities (p. 423), and 
Enghsh scholars began to employ the new scientific method in 
their search for new truths. The British Royal (Scientific) Soci- 
ety 2 had begun to meet as early as 1645, and ever since has pub- 
lished in its proceedings the best of English scientific thinking. 
By the reign of George I (1714-27) scientific work began to be 
popularized, and the first Httle booklets on scientific subjects 
began to appear. These popular presentations of what had been 
worked out were sold at the book stalls and by peddlers and were 
•eagerly read; by the beginning of the reign of George III (1760) 
they had become very common. In 1704-10 the first "Diction- 
ary of Arts and Sciences" was printed, and in 1768-71 the first 
edition (three volumes) of the now famous Encyclopcedia Britan- 
nica appeared. In 1 7 5 5 the famous British Museum was founded. 

^ "It is evident that a nation perfectly ignorant of physical laws will refer to 
supernatural causes all the phenomena by which it is surrounded. But as soon as 
natural science begins to do its work there are introduced the elements of a great 
change. Each successive discovery, by ascertaining the law that governs events, 
deprives them of that apparent mystery in which they were formerly involved. The 
love of the marvelous becomes proportionally diminished; and when any science has 
made such progress as to enable it to foretell the events with which it deals, it is 
dear that the whole of those events are at once withdrawn from the jurisdiction of 
the supernatural, and brought under the authority of natural powers. . . . Hence 
it is that, supposing other things equal, the superstition of a nation must always 
bear an exact proportion to the extent of its physical knowledge." (Buckle, H. T., 
History of Civilization in England, vol. i, p. 269.) 

2 The Charter of this Society stated the purpose to be to increase knowledge bj* 
direct experiment, and that the object of the Society was the extension ot natural 
knowledge, as opposed to that which is supernatural. As an institution embodying 
the idea of intellectual progress it was most bitterly assailed by partisans of the old 
jhinking. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 493 

As early as 1 698 a rude form of steam engine had been patented 
in England, and by 17 12 this had been perfected sufficiently to be 
used in pumping water from the coal mines. In 1 765 James Watt 
made the real beginning of the appHcation of steam to industry 
by patenting his steam engine; in 1760 Wedgwood estabHshed the 
pottery industry in England; in 1767 Hargreaves devised the 
spinning- Jenny, which banished the spindle and distaff and the 
old spinning-wheel; in 1769 Arkwright evolved his spinning- 
frame; and in 1785 Cartwright completed the process by invent- 
ing the power loom for weaving. In 1784 a great improvement 
in the smelting of iron ores (puddling) was worked out. These 
inventions, all Enghsh, were revolutionary in their effect on man- 
ufacturing. They meant the displacement of hand power by 
machine labor, the breakdown of home industry through the 
concentration of labor in factories, the rise of great manufacturing 
cities,^ and the ultimate collapse of the age-old apprenticeship 
system of training, where the master workman with a few appren- 
tices in his shop (p. 210) prepared goods for sale. They also 
meant the ultimate transformation of England from an agricul- 
tural into a great manufacturing and exporting nation, whose 
manufactured products would be sold in every corner of the 
globe. 

By 1750 a change in attitude toward all the old intellectual 
problems had become marked in England, and by 1775 attention 
before unknown was being given there to social, political, eco- 
nomic, and educational questions. Religious intolerance was 
dying out, the harsh laws of earlier days had begun to be modified, 
new social and political interests - were everywhere attracting 
attention, and the great commercial expansion of England was 
rapidly taking shape. With England and France leading in the 
new scientific studies; England in the van in the development of 
manufacturing and the French to the fore in social influences 
and polite literature; England and the new American Colonies 
setting new standards in government by the people; the French 

1 Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Manchester, for example, great manufac- 
turing cities early in the nineteenth century, were insignificant villages in Crom- 
well's day. The steam engine made the coal and iron deposits of northern England 
of immense value, and the "smoky mill towns" that arose in the north began to 
displace southern agricultural England in population, wealth, and importance. 

^ For example, in 1774 John Howard began his great work in prison reform; in 
1772 pressing to death was abolished; in 1780 the ducking-stool was used for the 
last time; and soon thereafter the earlier laws relating to the death penalty were 
modified, and the slave trade abolished. Up to the middle of the eighteenth cen' 
*^ury as many as one hundred and sixty offenses were punishable by death. 



494 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



theorists and economists giving the world new ideas as to the 
function of the State; enlightened despots on the thrones of Prus- 
sia, Austria, Spain, and Russia; and the hatreds of the hundred 
years of religious warfare dying out; the world seemed to many, 
about 1775, as on the verge of some great and far-reaching change 
in methods of living and in government, and about ready to enter 
a new era and make rapid advances in nearly all lines of human 
activity. The change came, but not in quite the manner expected. 



IV. INSTITUTION OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT AND 
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN AMERICA 

Englishmen in America establish a Republic. Though the 
early settlement of America, as was pointed out in chapter xv, 
was made from among those people and from those lands which 
had embraced some form of the Protestant faith, and represented 

a number of nationalities 
and several religious sects, 
the thirteen colonies, nev- 
ertheless, were essentially 
English in origin, speech, 
habits, observances, and 
political and religious con- 
ceptions. This is well 
shown for the white pop- 
ulation by the results of 
the first Federal census, 
taken in 1790, as given 
in the adjoining figure. 
This shows that of all the 
people in the thirteen orig- 
inal States, 83.5 per cent 
possessed names indicat- 
ing pure EngHsh origin, 
and that 91.8 per cent had names which pointed to their having 
come from the British Isles. The largest non-British name- 
nationality was the German, with 5.6 per cent of the whole, 
and these were found chiefly in Pennsylvania where they con- 
stituted 26.1 per cent of the State's population. Next were 
those having Dutch names, who constituted -but 2 per cent of 
the total population, and but 16.1 per cent of the population 
of New York. No other name-nationality constituted over one 




Fig. 152. Nationality of the WraTE Pop^ 
ulation, as shown by the family 
Names in the Census oe 1790 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 495 

half of one per cent of the total. The New England States were 
aknost as English as England itself, 93 to 96 per cent of the names 
being pure English, and 98.5 to 99.8 per cent being from the Brit- 
ish Isles. 

We thus see that it was from England, the nation which had 
done most in the development of individual and religious liberty, 
that the great bulk of the early settlers of America came, and in 
the New World the English traditions as to constitutional govern- 
ment and Kberty under law were early and firmly established. 
The centuries of struggle for representative government in Eng- 
land at once bore fruit here. Colony charters, charters of rights 
and liberties, public discussion, legislative assemblies, and liberty 
under law were from the first made the foundation stones upon 
which self-government in America was built up. 

From an early date the American Colonies showed an independ- 
ence to which even Enghshmen were scarcely accustomed, and 
when the home government attempted to make the colonists pay 
some of the expenses of the Seven Years' War, and a larger share 
of the expenses of colonial administration, there was determined 
opposition. Having no representation in Parliament and no 
voice in ley>dng the tax, the colonists declared that taxation with- 
out representation was tyranny, and refused to pay the taxes 
assessed. Standing squarely on their rights as Englishmen, the 
colonists were gradually forced into open rebellion. In 1765, and 
again in 1774, Declarations of Rights were drawn up and adopted 
by representatives from the Colonies, and were forwarded to the 
King. In 1774 the first Continental Congress met and formed a 
union of the Colonies; in 1776 the Colonies declared their inde- 
pendence. This was confirmed, in 1783, by the Treaty of Paris; 
in 1787, the Constitution of the United States was drafted; and 
in 1789, the American government began. In the preamble to 
the twenty-seven charges of tyranny and oppression made against 
the King in the Declaration of Independence, we find a statement 
of political philosophy ^ which is a combination of the results of 
the long English struggle for liberty and the French eighteenth- 
century reform philosophy and revolutionary demands.^ This 
preamble declared: 

^ The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, a great 
admirer of French life and a propagandist for French ideas. 

^ Compare the American preamble with the following sentence from the Social 
Contract (Book i, chap, ix) of Rousseau: 

"I shall close this chapter and this book with a remark which ought to serve as a 



496 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

We hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are created 
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalien- 
able rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among 
men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, 
whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, 
it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a 
new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organiz- 
ing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect 
their safety and happiness. 

American contributions to world history. The American 
Revolution and its results were fraught with great importance for 
the future political and educational progress of mankind. Before 
the close of the eighteenth century the new American government 
had made at least four important contributions to world liberty 
and progress which were certain to be of large political and educa- 
tional value for the futurci 

In the first place, the people of the Colonies had erected inde- 
pendent governments and had shown the possibility of the self- 
government of peoples on a large scale, and not merely in little 
city-states or communities, as had previously been the case where 
self-government had been tried. Democratic government was 
here worked out and applied to large areas, and to peoples of 
diverse nationalities and embracing different religious faiths. 
The possibility of States selecting their rulers and successfully 
governing themselves was demonstrated. 

In the second place, the new American government which was 
formed did something new in world history when it united thir- 
teen independent and autonomous States into a single federated 
Nation, and without destroying the independence of the States. 
What was formed was not a league, or confederacy, as had existed 
at different times among differing groups of the Greek City- 
States, and from time to time in the case of later Swiss and tem- 
porary European national groupings, but the union into a sub- 
stantial and permanent Federal State of a number of separate 
States which still retained their independence, and with provi- 
sion for the expansion of this national Union by the addition of 
new States. This federal principle in government is probably 
the greatest political contribution of the American Union to world 

basis for the whole social system; it is that instead of destroying natural equality, 
the fundamental pact, on the contrary, substitutes a moral and lawful equality for 
the physical inequality which nature imposed upon men, so that, although unequal 
"n strength or intellect, they all become equal by convention and legal right." 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 497 

development. In the twentieth-century conception of a League 
of Nations it has borne still further fruit. 

In the third place, the different American States changed their 
old Colonial Charters into definite written Constitutions, each 
of which contained a Preamble or Bill of Rights which affirmed 
the fundamental principles of democratic liberty (R. 251). These 
now became the fundamental law for each of the separate States, 
and the same idea was later worked out in the Constitution of 
the United States. These were the first written constitutions of 
history, and have since served as a type for the creation of con- 
stitutional government throughout the world. In such docu- 
ments to-day free peoples everywhere define the rights and duties 
and obligations which they regard as necessary to their safety 
and happiness and welfare. 

Finally, the Federal Constitution provided for the inestimable 
boon of rehgious liberty, and in a way that was both revolution- 
ary and wholesome. At the beginning of the War for Independ- 
ence the Anglican (Episcopal) faith had been declared '' the estab- 
lished reHgion" in seven of the Colonies, and the Congregational 
was the established religion in three of the New England Colonies, 
while but three Colonies had declared for religious freedom and 
refused to give a preference to any special creed. This religious 
problem had to be met by the Constitutional Convention, and 
this body handled it in the only way it could have been intelli- 
gently handled in a nation composed of so many different reli- 
gious sects as was ours. It simply incorporated into the Federal 
Constitution provisions which guaranteed the free exercise of 
their religious faith to all, and forbade the establishment by Con- 
gress of any state religion, or the requirement of any religious 
test as a prerequisite to holding any office under the control of 
the Federal Government. The American people thus took a 
stand for religious liberty at a time when the hatreds of the 
Reformation still burned fiercely, and when tolerance in religious 
matters was as yet but httle known. 

Importance of the religious-liberty contribution. The solution 
of the religious question arrived at was only second in importance 
for us to the establishment of the Federal Union, and the far- 
reaching significance to our future national life of the sane and 
for-the-time extraordinary provisions incorporated into our Na- 
tional Constitution can hardly be overestimated. This action 
led to the early abandonment of state religions, religious tests, and 



498 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

public taxation for religion in the old States, and to the prohibi- 
tion of these in the new. The importance of this solution of the 
religious question for the future of popular education in the 
United States was great, for it laid the foundations upon which 
our systems of free, common, public, tax-supported, non-sectarian 
schools have since been built up. How we could have erected a 
common public-school system on a religious basis, with the many 
religious sects among us, it is impossible to conceive. Instead, 
we should have had a series of feeble, jealous, antagonistic, and 
utterly inefficient church-school systems, chiefly confined to ele- 
mentary education, and each largely intent on teaching its pecu- 
liar church doctrines and struggling for an increasing share of 
public funds. 

How much the American people owe to the Fathers of the Re- 
public for this most enlightened and intelligent provision, few 
who have not thought carefully on the matter can appreciate. To 
it we must trace not only the great blessing of religious Hberty, 
which we have so long enjoyed, but also the final establishment of 
our common, free, public-school systems. The beginning of the 
new state motive for education, which was soon to supersede the 
reHgious motive, dates from the establishment with us of republi- 
can governments; and the beginning of the emancipation of edu- 
cation from church domination goes back to this wise provision 
inserted in our National Constitution. 

This national attitude was later copied in the state constitu- 
tions, and as a preamble to practically all we find a Bill of Rights, 
which in almost every case included a provision for freedom of 
religious worship (Rs. 251, 260). After the middle of the nine- 
teenth century a further provision prohibiting sectarian teaching 
or state aid to sectarian schools was everywhere added. 

V. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION SWEEPS AWAY ANCIENT ABUSES 

New demands for reform that could not be resisted. More 
than in any other continental European country France had, by 
1783, become a united nation, conscious of a modern national 
feeling. Yet in France mediaeval abuses in both State and 
Church had survived, as we have seen, to as great an extent al- 
most as in any European nation. So determined were the clergy 
and nobiUty to retain their old powers, not only in France but 
throughout the continent of Europe as well, that progressive re- 
form seemed well-nigh impossible. The work of the benevolent 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 499 

despots had, after all, been superficial. By the last quarter of the 
eighteenth, though, a progressive change was under way which 
was certain to produce either evolution or revolution. The influ- 
ence of the American experiment in nation-building now became 
pronounced. In 1779 FrankHn took a copy of the new Pennsyl- 




FiG. 153. The States-General in Session at Versailles 
(After a contemporary drawing by Monnet) 

vania Constitution with him to Paris, and in 1780 John Adams did 
the same with the Massachusetts Constitution. Frenchmen in- 
stantly recognized here, in concrete form, the ideas with which 
their own heads were filled. In 1 783 Franklin published in France 
a French translation of all the American Constitutions, and the 
National Constitution of 1787 was as eagerly read and discussed 
in Paris as in New York or Philadelphia or Boston, America 



500 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

appeared to the French of that stormy period as an ideal land, 
where the dreams of Rousseau about the social contract had beeii 
transformed into realities. Two years later the cahiers of the 
Third Estate demanded a written constitution for France. The 
French, too, had aided the American Colonies in their struggle 
for liberty, and French soldiers returning home carried back new 
political ideas drawn from the remarkable political progress of the 
new American Nation. By 1788 the demand for reform in France 
had become so insistent, and the condition of the treasury of the 
State was so bad, that it was finally felt necessary to summon a 
meeting of the States-General — a sort of national parliament 
consisting of representatives of the three great Estates: clergy, 
nobility, and commons — which had not met in France since 
1614. 

Besides electing its representatives, each locaHty and order was 
allowed to draw up a series of instructions, or cahiers (R. 252), for 
the guidance of its delegates. These cahiers are a mine of infor- 
mation as to the demands and hopes and interests of the French 
people,^ and it is interesting to know that the cahiers of nobility, 
clergy, and commons alike included, among their demands, the 
organization of a comprehensive plan of education for France.^ 

France establishes constitutional government. The States- 
General met May 5, 1789, and soon (June 20) resolved itself into 

^ "I read attentively the cahiers drawn up by the three Orders before their union 
in 1789. I see that here the change of a law is demanded, and there of a custom — 
and I make note of them. I continue thus to the end of this immense task, and, 
when I come to put side by side all these particular demands, I see, with a sort of 
terror, that what is called for is the simultaneous and systematic abolition of all the 
laws and of all the customs existing in the country; whereupon I instantly perceive 
the approach of the vastest and most dangerous revolutions that have taken place 
in the world." (De Tocqueville, A. C, State of Society in France before the Revolu- 
tion of 1789, p. 219.) 

* For example, the clergy of Rodez and Saumur demanded "that there may be 
formed a plan of national education for the young"; the clergy of Lyonslhat educa- 
tion be restricted " to a teaching body whose members may not be removable except 
for negligence, misconduct, or incapacity; that it may no longer be conducted ac- 
cording to arbitrary principles, and that all public instructors be obliged to conform 
to a uniform plan adopted by the States-General"; the clergy of Blois that a system 
of colleges under church control be formed (R. 252); the nobility of Lyons that "a 
national character be impressed on the education of both sexes " ; the nobility of Pans 
that "public education be perfected and extended to all classes of citizens"; the 
nobility of Blois that "better facilities for the education of children, and elementary 
textbooks adapted to their capacity, wherein the rights of man and the social duties 
shall be clearly set forth" shall be provided, and to this end that "there be estab- 
lished a council composed of the most enlightened scholars of the capital and of the 
provinces and of the citizens of the different orders, to formulate a plan of national 
education, for the benefit of all classes of society, and to edit elementary textbooks." 
The Third Estate of Blois demanded the establishment of free schools in all the rural 
parishes. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 501 

the National or Constituent Assembly. Terrified by the upris- 
ings and burnings of chateaux throughout France, on the night of 
August fourth, in a few hours, it adopted a series of decrees which 
virtually abohshed the Ancien Regime of privileges for France, 
The nobility gave up most of their old rights, the serfs ^ were 
freed, and the special privileges of towns were surrendered. Later 
the Assembly adopted a "Declaration of Rights of Man and of 
the Citizen" (R. 253), much like the American Declaration of In- 
dependence. This declared, among other things, that all men 
were born free and have equal rights, that taxes should be propor- 
tional to wealth, that all citizens were equal before the law and 
have a right to help make the laws, and that the people of the na- 
tion were sovereign. These principles struck at the very founda- 
tions of the old system. 

Soon a Constitution for France, the first ever promulgated in 
modern Europe, was prepared and adopted (1791). This abol- 
ished the ancient privileges and reorganized France as a self-gov- 
erning nation, much after the American plan. Local government 
was created, and the absolute monarchy was changed to a limited 
constitutional one. Next the property of the Church was taken 
•over by the State, the monasteries were suppressed, and the 
priests and bishops were made state officials and paid a fixed state 
salary. The Jesuits had been expelled from France in 1764; and 
in 1792 the Brothers of the Christian Schools were not allowed 
longer to teach. Among other important matters, the Constitu- 
tion of 1 791 declared that: 

There shall be created and organized a system of public instruction 
common to all citizens, and gratuitous, with respect to those branches 
of instruction which are indispensable for all men. 

Up to this point the Revolution in France had proceeded rela- 
tively peacefully, considering the nature of the long-standing 
abuses which were to be remedied. In August, 1792, the King 
was imprisoned, and in January, 1793, he was executed and a Re- 
pubUc proclaimed.^ Then followed a reign of terror, which we do 

^ See footnote i, page 165. One of the great results of the French Revolution 
was the abolition of serfdom in central and western Europe. The last European 
nation to emancipate its serfs was Russia, where they were freed in 1861. 

^ "Great was the difference between France at the end of 1791 and at the end of 
1793. At the former date all looked hopeful for the future; the king was the father 
of his people; the Constitution of 179 1 was to regenerate France, and set an example 
to Europe; all old institutions had been renovated; everything was new, and popular 
on account of its novelty. . . . By the end of 1793 all looked threatening for the fu- 
ture; for the purpose Qf repelling her foreign foes, who included nearly the whole of 



502 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

not need to follow, and which ended only when Napoleon became 
master of France. 

Beneficent results of the Revolution. The French Revolution 
was not an accident or a product of chance, but rather the inevita- 
ble result of an attempt to dam up the stream of human progress 
and prevent its orderly onward flow. The Protestant Revolts 
were the first great revolutionary wave, the Puritan revolution in 
England was another, the formation of the American Republic 
and the institution of constitutional government and religious 
freedom another, while the French Revolution brought the rising 
movement to a head and swept away, in a deluge of blood, the 
very foundations of the mediaeval system. Along with much that 
was disastrous, the French Revolution accompKshed after all 
much that was of greatest importance for human progress. The 
world at times seems to be in need of such a great catharsis. 
Progress was made in a decade that could hardly have been made 
in a century by peaceful evolution. The old order of privilege 
came to an end, medieevalism was swept away, and the serf was 
evolved into the free farmer and citizen. One fifth of the soil of 
France was restored to the use of the people from the monaster- 
ies, and an additional one third from the Church and nobility. 
The new principles of citizenship — Liberty, Equality, and Fra- 
ternity — were for France revolutionary in the extreme, while the 
assertion that the sovereignty of a nation rests with the people 
rather than with the king, here successfully promulgated, ended 
for all time the *'divine-right-of -kings" idea for France. After 
poHtical theory had for a time run mad, the organizing genius of 
Napoleon consolidated the gains, gave France a strong govern- 
ment, a unifonn code of laws,^ and began that organization of 
schools for the nation which ultimately meant the taking over of 
education from the Church and its provision at the expense of and 
in the interests of the nation, 

Europe, France submitted to be ground down by the most despotic and arbitrary 
government ever known in modern history, — the Great Committee of Pubhc 
Safety; the Reign of Terror was in full exercise, and it was doubtful whether the 
energy, audacity, and concentrated vigour of the Great Committee would enable 
France to be victorious over Europe, and thus secure for her the right of deciding 
on the character of their own government. She was to be successful, but at what a 
cost!" (Stephens, H. M., The French Revolution, vol. ii, p. 512.) 

^ The Code Napoleon, prepared in 1804, was the first modern code of civil laws, 
though Frederick the Great had earlier prepared a partial code of Prussian laws. 
What the Justinian Code was to ancient Rome, this, organized into better form, was 
to modern France. This Code, prepared under Napoleon's direction, substituted 
one uniform code of laws worthy of a modern nation for the thousands of local laws 
which formerly prevailed in France, 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 503 

The national idea extends to other lands. The reform work in 
France, together with the examples of English and American lib- 
erty, soon began to have their influence in other lands as well. 
People everywhere began to see that the old regime of privilege 
and misgovemment ought to be replaced. Other countries abol- 
ished serfdom, introduced better laws, and made reforms in the 
abuses of both Church and State. French armies and rulers car- 
ried the best of French ideas to other lands, and, where the French 
rule continued long enough, these ideas became fixed. In particu- 
lar was the Code Napoleon copied in the Netherlands^ the ItaHan 
States, and the States of southern and western Germany. The 
national spirit of Italy was awakened, and the Itahan Uberals be- 
gan to look forward to the day when the small Italian States might 
be reunited into an Italian Nation, with Rome as its capital. This 
became the work of nineteenth-century Itahan statesmen. For 
the first time in Spanish history, too, the people became conscious, 
under French occupation, of a feehng of national unity, and simi- 
larly the national spirit of German lands was stirred by the con- 
quests of Napoleon. 

A constitution was obtained in Spain, in 181 2, and between 
1815 and 1821 all of Spain's South American colonies — -Argen- 
tina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, 
Uruguay, and Venezuela — revolted, became independent, and 
set up republics with constitutional governments, some of the 
larger ones based on the federal principle, as in the United States. 
Brazil similarly freed itself from Portugal and set up a constitu- 
tional and federated monarchy, in 1822. The Kingdom of Naples 
obtained constitutional government in 1820, and Sardinia in 1821. 
In 1823, when Spain with Austria's aid prepared to reconquer the 
Spanish South American RepubHcs, President Monroe trans- 
mitted to the American Congress his message in which he de- 
clared that any attempt on the part of European nations to sup- 
press repubhcanism on the American continent would be consid- 
ered by the United States as an unfriendly act. This has since 
been known as the Monroe Doctrine. In 1829 Greece obtained 
her independence from Turkey, and in 1843 ^ constitutional form 
of government was obtained. 

Important consequences of the democratic movement. Since 
the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when democratic 
government and written constitutions began, the sweep of demo- 
cratic government has become almost world wide. Nation aftei 



504 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

nation has chcuged to democratic and constitutional forms of 
government, the latest additions being Portugal (1911), China 
(1912), Russia (1917), and Germany (1918). New English colo- 
nies, too, have carried English self-government into almost every 
continent. The World War of 1 914-18 gave a new emphasis to 
democracy, and there is good reason to believe that government 
of and by and for the people is ultimately destined to prevail 
among all the intelligent nations and races of the earth. 

With the development of democratic government there has 
everywhere been a softening of old laws, the growth of humani- 
tarianism, the wider and wider extension of the suffrage, impor- 
tant legislation as to labor, a previously unknown attention to the 
poor and the dependents of society, a vast extension of educa- 
tional advantages, and the taking over of education from the 
Church by the State and the erection of the school into an im- 
portant institution for the preservation and advancement of the 
national welfare. These consequences of the onward sweep of 
new-world ideas we shall trace more in detail in the chapters 
which follow. 



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Show the importance, for human progress, of each of the meanings of the 
new eighteenth-century HberaUsm, as enumerated on pages 471-72. 

2. How do you explain the lack of any permanent influence on Spanish life 
of the work of the benevolent despots in Spain? 

3. Show the liberahzing influence of the rise of scientific investigation and 
economic studies, for a nation still oppressed by mediasvalism and bad 
government. 

4. Enumerate the new sciences which arose in the eighteenth century. 

5. Indicate the iiiportance of the freedom of the press in the development 
of English political liberty. 

6. Explain how the religious-freedom attitude of the American national 
constitution conferred an inestimable boon on the States in the matter 
of public education. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following illustrative selections 
are reproduced: 

247. Dabney: Ecclesiastical Tyranny in France. 

248. Voltaire: On the Relation of Church and State. 

249. Rousseau: Extract from the Social Contract. 

250. Buckle: Changes in English Thinking in the Eighteenth Century, 

251. Pennsylvania Constitution: Bill of Rights in. 

252. Clergy of Blois: Cahicr of 1779. 

253. France: Declaration of the Rights of Man. 



EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY 505 



QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

t. Explain why ecclesiastical tyranny should have awakened such a spirit 
of rebellion in France (247), and not in Spain or in ItaHan lands. 

2. Just what attitude toward religion is shown in the extract from Voltaire 
(248)? 

3. Bolshevists in Russia and in America talk to-day as did Rousseau in the 
Social Contract (249). Compare the justification of each with the 
eighteenth-century France of Rousseau. 

\. What do all the changes enumerated by Buckle (250) indicate as to the 
spread of general education, irrespective of schools, among the English 
people? 

5. Compare the Pennsylvania Bill of Rights of 1776 (251) with that of your 
own present-day state constitution. 

5. Just what type of educational provisions, and what administrative 
organization, did the recommendations of the Clergy of Blois (252) con- 
template? Indicate its shortcomings for eighteenth-century France. 

7. Compare the main ideas of 251 and 253. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Dabney, R. H. The Causes of the French Revolution. 
Taine, H. A. The Ancient Regime. 



CHAPTER XX 
THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 
I. NEW CONCEPTIONS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE 

The state as servant of the Church. With the rise of the Prot- 
estant sects we noted, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and 
for the first time since Christianity became supreme in the west- 
em world, the beginnings of a state connection with the education 
of the young. The Protestant reformers, obtaining the support 
of the Protestant princes and kings, had successfully used this 
support to assist them in the organization of church schools as an 
aid to the reformed faith. Luther, it will be recalled (p. 312), 
had made a strong appeal to the mayors and magistrates of all 
German lands to establish schools as a part of their civic duties 
(R. 156), and had contended that a solemn obHgation rested upon 
them to do so. The Dutch Provinces had worked closely with 
the Dutch Protestant synods (p. 334) in ordering schools estab- 
lished and in providing for their financing; Calvin had organized 
a religious City-State at Geneva (p. 330), of which religion and 
learning had been the corner-stones; the Scottish Parliament, by 
the laws of 1633 and 1646 (p. 335), had ordered schools for Scot- 
tish children in connection with the churches; and in the Scandi- 
navian countries and in Finland the beginnings of a connection 
with the State had also been made (p. 315). Finally, in the new 
Massachusetts Colony the laws of 1642 and 1647 (p. 366) had, for 
the first time in the English-speaking world, ordered that children 
be taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and 
the capital laws of the country" (p. 364), and that schools be es- 
tabHshed by the towns, under penalty if they refused to do so. In 
all Protestant lands we saw that the reformers appealed, from 
time to time, to what were then the servants of the churches — 
the rising civil governments and principalities and States — to 
use their civil authority to force the people to meet their new 
religious obligations in the matter of schoohng. 

The purpose of the schoohng ordered estabHshed, however, was 
almost wholly reHgious. Massachusetts, in ordering instruction 
in the "capital laws of the country," as well as reading and re- 
ligion, had formed a marked exception. In nearly all lands the 
rising state governments merely helped the Protestant churches 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 507 

to create the elementary vernacular religious school, and to make 
of it an auxiliary for the protection of orthodoxy and the advance- 
ment of the faith. Even in the new state school systems of the 
German States — Saxony, Wurtemberg (p. 317), Brunswick, 
Weimar, Gotha — the elementary schools established were for re- 
ligious rather than for state ends. This condition continued until 
well toward the middle of the eighteenth century. 

The new state theory of education. After about the middle of 
the eighteenth century a new theory as to the purpose of educa- 
tion, and one destined to make rapid headway, began to be ad- 
vanced. This theory had already made marked progress, as we 
shall see, in the New England Colonies, and had also found ex- 
pression, as we shall also see in a later chapter, in the organizing 
work of Frederick the Great in Prussia. It was from the French 
political philosophers of the eighteenth century, though, that its 
clearest definition came. They now advanced the idea that 
schools were essentially civil affairs, the purpose of which should 
be to promote the everyday interests of society and the welfare of j 
the State, rather than the welfare of the Church, and to prepare ^ 
for a life here rather than a life hereafter. 

After about 1750 a critical and reformatory pedagogy rapidly 
began to take shape in France, and the second half of the eight- 
eenth century became a period of criticism and discontent and 
reconstruction in education, as well as in politics and religion. 

This criticism and discontent in France was greatly stimulated 
by the decline in character and influence of the Jesuit schools. 
Unwilling to change their instruction to meet the needs of a chang- 
ing society, their schools had become formal in character (R. 146), 
and were now engaged chiefly in stifling thinking rather than in 
promoting it. In consequence the schools had fallen into disre- 
pute throughout all France. The Society, too, in the eighteenth 
century, came to be a powerful political organization which strove 
to dominate the State. So bad had the situation become b} 
1762, that the different parhaments in the provinces and in Paris 
had formulated complaints against the Jesuits and their schools,^ 

1 The complaints were largely along such lines as that the instruction was confined 
to a few Latin authors; that instruction in the French language was neglected; that 
instruction in the history and geography of France should be introduced; that time 
was wasted "in copying and learning notebooks filled with vain distinctions and 
frivolous questions"; that training in the use of the French language should be 
substituted for the disputations in Latin; that in religion the study of the Bible was 
neglected for books of devotion and propaganda compiled by the members of the 
Order; that moral casuistry and religious bigotry were taught; and that the disci- 
pline was unnecessarily severe and wrong in character. 



5o8 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



and, in 1764, the king was induced to suppress the Order. ^ This 
decline in influence and final suppression of the Society gave rise 
to some rather remarkable pedagogical Uterature, which looked to 
the creation of a system of state secondary schools in France to 
replace those of the Jesuits. 

The outcome was the rise of a new national and individual con- 
ception of the educational purpose. This was destined in time to 
spread to other lands and to lead to the rise of complete state 
school systems, financed and managed by the State and conducted 
^or state ends, and to the ultimate divorce of Church and State, in 
all progressive lands, in the matter of the education of the young. 
Teachers trained and certificated by the State were in time to 
supplant the nuns and brothers of the religiouc congregations in 
Catholic lands, as well as teachers who served as assistants to the 
pastors in Protestant lands and whose cliief purpose was to up- 
hold the teachings and advance the interests of the sect; citizens 
were to supplant the ecclesiastic in the supervision of instruction; 
and the courses of instruction were to be changed in direction and 
vastly broadened in scope to make them minister to the needs of 
the State rather than the Church, and to prepare pupils for useful 
life here rather than for life in another world. 

II. THE NEW STATE THEORY IN FRANCE 

The French political theorists. The leading French pohtical 
theorists of the two decades between 1760 
and 1780 now began to discuss education 
as in theory a civil affair, intimately con- 
nected with the promotion of the welfare 
of the State. The more important of 
these, and their chief ideas were: 

I . Rousseau. The first of the critical and 
reformatory pedagogical writers to awaken 
any large interest and obtain a general 
hearing was Jean- Jacques Rousseau. The 
same year (1762) that his Social Contract 
appeared and attacked the foundations of 
the old pohtical system (p. 483), his Emile 
also appeared and attacked with equal vigor the rehgious and 

1 In 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal, in 1767 from Spain, and in 
1773 the Pope at Rome, "recqgnizing that the members of this Society have not a 
little troubled the Christian commonwealth, and that for the welfare of Christendom 
it were better that the Order should disappear," abolished the Society entirely. 
Forty years later it was reconstituted in a modernized form. 




Fig. 154. Rousseau 
( 1712-78) 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 509 

social theory as to education then prevailing throughout western 
Europe. For the stiff and unnatural methods in education, under~""\ 
which children were dressed and made to behave as adults/ the / 
harsh discipline of the time, and the excessive emphasis on rehgious 
instruction and book education, he preached the substitution of 
Ufe amid nature, childish ways and sports, parental love, and an 
education that considered the instincts and natural development 
of children. 

Gathering up the political and social ideas of his age as to ec- 
clesiastical and political despotism; the nature of the social con- 
tract; that the " state of nature " was the ideal one, and the one in 
which men had been intended to live; that human duty called for 
a return to the "state of nature," whatever that might be; and 
that the artificiality and hypocrisy of his age in manners, dress, 
rehgion, and education were all wrong — Rousseau restated hisN 
pohtical philosophy in terms of the education of the boy, Fmile^ 
Despite its many exaggerations, much faulty reasoning, and many 
imperfections, the book had a tremendous influence upon Europe 
in laying bare the limitations and defects and abuses of the formal 
and ecclesiastical education of the time.^ He may be regarded as 
the first important writer to sap the foundations of the old system 
of religious education, and to lay a basis for a new type of child 
training (R. 254). Though Rousseau's enthusiasm took the form 
of theory run mad, and the educational plan he proposed was 
largely impossible, he nevertheless popularized education, not 
only in France, but among the reading public of the progressive 
European States as well. After he had written, the old Umited 
and narrow religious education was on the defensive, and, though 
time was required, the transition to a more secular t>pe of educa- 
tion was inevitable as fast as nations and peoples could shake off 
the dominance of the Church in state affairs. 

2. La Chalotais. The year following the publication of Rous- 
seau's Emile appeared La Chalotais's Essai d' education nationale 
(1763). Rene de la Chalotais, a SoHci tor-General for the Parlia- 
ment of Bretagne, was one of the notable French parliamentari- 

1 Little boys wore their hair long and powdered, carried a sword, and had coats 
with gilded cuffs, while little girls were dressed in imitation of the lady of fashion. 
Proper deportment was an important part of a child's training. 

'^ The iconoclastic nature of Rousseau's volume may be inferred from its opening 
sentence, in which he says: "Everything is good as it comes from the hand of the 
author of nature; everything degenerated in the hand of man." In another place 
he breaks out: "Man is born, lives, and dies in a state of slavery. At his birth he is 
stitched into swaddling clothes, at his death he is nailed in his coffin; and as long as 
he preserves the human form he is held captive by our institutions." 



510 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 1 55 

La Chalotais 

(1701-83) 



ans of the middle of the eighteenth century. Unlike Rousseau's 
highly imaginary, exaggerated, sentimental, and paradoxical vol- 
ume, La Chalotais produced a practical and philosophical discus- 
sion of the problem of the education of a 
people. Declaring firmly that education 
was essentially a civil affair; that it was the 
function of government to make citizens con- 
tented by educating them for their sphere in 
society; that citizen and secular teachers 
should not be excluded for celibates; ^ that 
the real purpose of education should be to 
prepare citizens for France; that the poor 
were deserving of education; and that "the 
most enlightened people will always have the 
advantage" in the struggles of a modem 
world, La Chalotais produced a work which 
was warmly approved by such political phil- 
osophers as Voltaire, Diderot, and Turgot, 
and which was translated into several European languages (R. 
255). Though far less widely read than Rousseau's Emile, it was 
far more influential in shaping subse- 
quent political theory and action regard- 
ing the relations of education to the State. 
Nearly every proposal for educational 
legislation during the days of the Revo- 
lution went back in idea to this philoso- 
phic discussion of the question by La 
Chalotais and to the practical proposals 
of Rolland and Turgot. 

3. Rolland. In 1768 Rolland, presi- 
dent of the Parliament of Paris, presented 
to his colleagues a report in which he 
outlined a national system of educa- 
tion to replace both the schools of the 

Jesuits and those of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. La 
Chalotais had proposed a more modern system of state schools 
chiefly to replace those of the Jesuits, but Rolland went further 

1 "I do not presume to exclude ecclesiastics, but I protest against the exclusion 
of laymen. I dare claim for the nation an education which depends only on the 
State, because it belongs essentially to the State; because every State has an inalien- 
able and indefeasible right to instruct its members; because, finally, the children of 
the State ought to be ^ucated by the members of the State." (La Chalotais.) 




Fig. 156. Rolland 
(1734-93) 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 511 

and proposed the extension of education to all, and the supervi- 
sion of all schools by a central council of the Government. By 
means of a centralized control, a central university to which the 
other universities of France were to be subordinate, a higher 
normal school to train teachers for the colleges (secondary 
schools), and universal education, 1 RoUand hoped to develop for 
France a national spirit, a national character, and a national gov- 
ernment and code of laws, and to bring the youth of the provinces 
into harmony with the best of all French ideas. 

4. Turgot. In 1774 Turgot was appointed Minister of Finance 
(p. 481), and in 1775 he made a series of recommendations to the 
King in which he set forth ideas analogous to those of Rolland, 
and presented an eloquent plea for the formation of a national 
council of public instruction and the estabhshment of a system of 
civil and national education for the whole of France. In closing 
he wrote : 

Your kingdom, Sir, is of this world. Without opposing any obstacle 
to the instructions whose object is higher, and which already have their 
rules and their expounders, I think I can propose to you nothing of more 
advantage to your people than to cause to be given to all your subjects 
an instruction which shows them the obligations they owe to society 
and to your power to protect them, and the interest they have in ful- 
Bling those duties for the public good and their own. This moral and 
social instruction requires books expressly prepared, by competition, 
and with great care, and a schoolmaster in each parish to teach them 
to children, along with the art of writing, reading, counting, measuring, 
and the principles of mechanics. The study of the duty of citizenship 
ought to be the foundation of all the other studies. . . . There are 
methods and establishments for training geometricians, physicists, and 
painters, but there are none for training citizens, 

5. Diderot. In 1776 Diderot, editor with D'Alembert of the 
£wcyc/o/»(^Jia (1751-72), prepared, at the request of Catherine II 
(p. 477), under the title of Plan of a University, a complete scheme 
for the organization of a state system of public instruction for 
Russia. Though the plan was never carried out, it was printed 
and much discussed in France, and is important as coming from 
one of the most influential Frenchmen of his time. He commends 
as an example to be followed the work of the German States in the 
organization of popular instruction. For Russia he outlines first 

^ "Education cannot be too widely diffused, to the end that there may be no 
class of citizens who may not be brought to participate in its benefits. It is expedi- 
ent that each citizen receive the education which is adapted to his needs." (Rol- 
land.) 



512 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

a system of people's schools, which shall be free and obligatory for 
all, and in which instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, mor- 
als, civics, and rehgion shall be taught. "From the Prime Minis- 
ter to the lowest peasant," he says, "it is good for every one to 
know how to read, write, and count." For the series of secondary 
schools to be established, he condemns the usual practice of devot- 
ing so much of the instruction to the humanities and a mediaeval 
type of logic and ethics, and urges instead the introduction of in- 
struction in mathematics, in the modern sciences, literature, and 
the work of governments. Classical studies he would confine to 
the last years of the course. Science, history, drawing, and music 
find a place in his scheme. 

All this instruction Diderot would place under the supervisory 
control of an administrative bureau to be known as the University 
of Rusna, at the head of which should be a statesman, who should 
exercise control of all the work of public instruction beneath. 
Though never carried out in Russia, the University of France of 
1808 is largely an embodiment of the ideas he proposed in 1776. 

Legislative proposals to embody these ideas. During the quar- 
ter of a century between the publication of Rousseau's Emile and 
the summoning of the States-General to reform France (1762-88), 
the educational as well as the political ideas of the French reform- 
ers had taken deep root with the thinking classes of the nation. 
The cahiers of 1789, of all Orders (p. 500), gave evidence of this 
in their somewhat general demand for the creation of some form 
of an educational system for France (R. 252). From the first 
days of the Revolution pedagogical literature became plentiful, 
and the successive National Asseniblies found time, amid the in- 
ternal reorganization of France, constitution-making, the trou- 
bles with and trial of the King, and the darkening cloud of foreign 
intervention, to listen to reports and addresses on education and 
to enact a bill for the organization of a national school system. 
The more important of these educational efforts were: 

I. The Constituent Assembly (June 17, 1789, to September 30, 
1791). In the Constituent Assembly, into which the States-Gen- 
eral resolved itself, June 17, 1789, and which continued until after 
it had framed the constitution of 1791, two notable addresses and 
one notable report on the organization of education were made. 
The Count de Mirabeau, a nobleman turned against his class and 
elected to the States-General as a representative of the Third 
Estate, made addresses on the "Organization of a Teaching 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 513 




Fig. 157 

Count de Mirabeau 

(1749-91) 



Body," and on the ''Organization of a National L>'cce." In the first 
he advocated the estabhshment of primary schools throughout 
France. In the second he proposed the establishment of colleges 
of Hterature in each department, with a 
National Lycee at Paris for higher (uni- 
versity) education, and to contain the es- 
sentials of a national normal school or 
teachers' college as well. 

Mirabeau 's proposals represent rather a 
transition in thinking from the old to the 
new, but the Report of Talleyrand (1791), 
former Bishop of Autun, now turned revo- 
lutionist, embodies the full culmination of 
revolutionary educational thought. Pub- 
lic instruction he termed ''a power which 
embraces everything, from the games of 
infancy to the most imposing fetes of tlie 
Nation." He definitely proposed the or- 
ganization of a complete state system of public instruction fcr 
France, to consist of a primary school in every canton (com- 
munity, district), open to the children of peasants and workmen 
■ — classes heretofore unprovided with edu- 
cation; a secondary school in every depart- 
ment (county) ; a series of special schools 
in the chief French cities, to prepare for 
the professions; and a National Institute, 
or University, to be located at Paris. In- 
spired by Montesquieu's principle that 
"the laws of education ought to be rela- 
tive to the principles of government," 
Talleyrand proposed a bill designed to 
give effect to the provisions of the Con- 
stitution of 1 791 relating to education (p. 
501), and to provide an education for the 
people of France who were now to exercise, 
through elected representatives, the legis- 
lative power for France. Instruction he held to be the necessary 
counterpoise of Hberty, and every citizen was to be taught to 
know, obey, love, and protect the new constitution. PoHtical, 
social, and personal morahty were to take the place of religion in 
the cantonal schools, which were to be free and equally open to 




Fig. 



158. Talleyrand 
(1758-1838) 



514 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 159. CoNDORCET 
(1743-94) 



all. As the Constituent Assembly was succeeded by the newly 
elected Legislative Assembly within three weeks after Talleyrand 
submitted his Report, no action was taken on his bill. 

2. The Legislative Assembly (October i, 1791, to September 21, 
1792). This new legislative body was far more radical in char- 
acter than its predecessor, and far more radical than was the 
sentiment of France at the time. Among 
other acts it abolished (1792) the old uni- 
versities and confiscated (1793) their prop- 
erty to the State. To it was submitted 
(April 20-21, 1792) by the mathematician, 
philosopher, and revolutionist, Marquis de 
Condorcet,^ on behalf of the Committee 
on Public Instruction and as a measure of 
reconstruction, a Report and draft of a 
Law for the organization of a complete 
democratic system of public instruction 
for France (R. 256). It provided for the 
organizing of a primary school for every 
four hundred inhabitants, in which each individual was "to 
be taught to direct his own conduct and to enjoy the pleni- 
tude of his own rights," and where principles would be taught, 
calculated to "insure the perpetuation of Hberty and equality." 
The bill also provided, for the first time, for the organization 
of higher primary schools in the principal towns; colleges (sec- 
ondary schools) in the chief cities (one for every four thousand 
inhabitants); a higher school for each "department"; Lycees, 
or institutions of still higher learning, at nine places in France; 
and a National Society of Sciences and Arts to crown the edu- 
cational system at Paris. The national S3^stem of education he 
proposed was to be equally open to women, as well as men, and 
to be gratuitous throughout. Teachers for each grade of school 
were to be prepared in the school next above. Sunday lectures 
for workingmen and peasants were to be given by teachers every- 
where. Public morahty, political intelhgence, human progress, 
and the preservation of liberty and equality were the aims of 
the instruction. The necessity for education in a constitutional 
government he saw clearly. "A free constitution," he writes, 

1 Condorcet had not been a member of the Constituent Assembly, but for some 
years had been deeply interested in the idea of public education, and had pubUshed 
five articles on the subject. His Report was a sort of embodiment, in legal form, of 
his previous thinking on the question. 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 515 



"which should not be correspondent to the universal instruction 
of citizens, would come to destruction after a few conflicts, and 
would degenerate into one of those forms of government which 
cannot preserve the peace among an ignorant and corrupt peo- 
ple." Anarchy or despotism he held to be the future for peoples 
who become free without being enlightened. He held it to be a 
fundamental principle that: 

The order of nature includes no distinctions in society beyond those 
of education and wealth. To establish among citizens an equality in 
fact, and to realize the equality confirmed by law, ought to be the 
primary object of national instruction. 

The bill proposed by Condorcet, while too ambitious for the 
France of his day, was thoroughly sound as a democratic theory 
of education, and an accurate prediction of what the nineteenth 
century brought gener- 
ally in to existence. Con- 
dorcet's Report was dis- 
cussed, but not acted 
upon. 

3. The National Con- 
vention (September 2 1 , 
1792, to October 26, 
1795). The Convention 
was also a radical body, 
deeply interested in the 
creation of a system of 
state schools for the peo- 
ple of France. To higher 
education there was for 
a time marked opposi- 
tion, though later in its 
history the Convention 
erected a number of im- 
portant higher technical 
institutions and schools. 




Fig. 160. The Institute of France 

Founded by Article 298 of the Constitution of 

Year III (1793) 



among the most important of which was the Institute of France. 
There was also in the Convention marked opposition to all forms 
of clerical control of schools. The schools of the Brothers of the 
Christian Schools were suppressed by it, in 1792, and all secular 
and endowed schools and colleges were abolished and their prop- 
erty confiscated, in 1 793 . The complete supremacy of the State in 



5i6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

all educational matters was now asserted. Great enthusiasm was 
manifested for the organization of state primary schools, which 
were ordered estabhshed in 1793 (R. 258 a), and in these: 

Children of all classes were to receive that first education, physical, 
moral, and intellectual, the best adapted to develop in them republican 
manners, patriotism, and the love of labor, and to render them worthy 
of liberty and equality. 

The course of instruction was to include: "to speak, read, and write 
correctly the French language; the geography of France; the rights and 
duties of men and citizens; ^ the first notions of natural and familiar 
objects; the use of numbers, the compass, the level, the system of 
weights and measures, the mechanical powers, and the measurement of 
time. They are to be taken into the fields and the workshops where 
they may see agricultural and mechanical operations going on, and 
take part in the same so far as their age will allow." 

What a change from the course of instruction in the religious 
schools just preceding this period! 

A multiplicity of reports, bills, and decrees, often more or less 
contradictory but still embodying ideas advanced by Condorcet 
and Talleyrand, now appeared. Whereas 
the preceding legislative bodies had con- 
sidered the subject carefully, but without 
taking action, the Convention now acted. 
The nation, though, was so engrossed by 
the internal chaos and foreign aggression 
that there was neither time nor funds to 
carry the decrees into effect. 

The most extreme proposal of the period 
y >^ ^^^.MvV^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ Lepelletier le Saint-Fargeau 
^ j,y to create a national system of education 
' y' ^ modeled closely after that of ancient Sparta. 
Fig. 161. Lakanal Y\x<d best of the proposals probably was 
(1762-1845) ^^ Lakanal Law, of November 17, 1794, 

which ordered a school for every one thousand inhabitants, with 
special divisions for boys and girls, and which provided for in- 
struction in: 

1. Reading and writing the French language. 

2. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Constitution. 

3. Lessons on republican morals. 




1 All the educational aims of the past were now relegated to a second place, and 
man became a political animal, "brought into the world to know, to love, and to 
obey the Constitution." The Declaration of the Rights of Man became the new 
Catechism of childhood. 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 517 

4. The rules of simple calculation and surveying. 

5. Lessons in geography and the phenomena of nature. 

6. Lessons on heroic actions, and songs of triumph. 

Lakanal also carefully prescribed the method of instruction, and 
advocated the founding of a national normal school (Latin 
norma: a rule), which idea the Convention adopted in 1794, the 
school opening ^ in January, 1795. Supplementing this was the 
law of February 25, 1795, ordering central or higher schools es- 
tablished to replace the former colleges,- one for every three hun- 
dred thousand of the population, which were to offer instruction 
from twelve to eighteen. The course was to include: 

12 to 14 — Drawing, natural history, ancient and living languages. 
14 to 16 — Mathematics, natural philosophy, experimental chemis- 

16 to 18 — Grammar, literature, history, legislation. 

Organized on a soviet principle, each professor declared the 
equal of every other, and lacking any effective administration or 
discipline, these institutions soon fell into disrepute and were 
displaced when Napoleon reorganized secondary education in 
France. 

The law of October 25, 1795, closed the work of the Conven- 
tion. This made less important pro\asions for primary education 
(R, 258 b) than had preceding bills, but was the only permanent 
contribution of tliis period to the organization of primary schools- 
It placed greater emphasis than had the legislative Assembly on 
the creation of secondary and higher institutions (R. 258 a), of 
more value to the bourgeois class. This bill of 1795 represents a 
reaction from the extreme republican ideas of a few years earlier, 
and the triumph of the conservative middle-class elements in the 
nation over the radical republican elements previously in control. 

The Convention also, in the latter part of its history, created 
a number of higher technical institutions of importance, which 

' This was created on a grand and visionary scale. Its purpose was to supply 
professors for the higher institutions. It opened with a large attendance, and lec- 
tures on mathematics, science, politics, and languages were given by the most emi- 
nent scholars of the time. A normal school, though, it hardly was, and in 1795 it 
closed — a virtual failure. In 1808 Napoleon re-created it, on a less pretentious 
and a more useful scale, and since then it has continued and rendered useful service 
as a training-school for teachers for the higher secondary schools of France. 

^ A total of 105 of these Central Schools were to be established, five in Paris, and 
one in each of the one hundred chief towns in the departments. By 1796 there 
were 40, by 1797 there were 52, by 1798 there were 59, by 1799 there were 86, and 
by 1800 there were 91 such schools in existence. This, times considered, was a 
remarkable development. 



5i8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

were expressive alike of the French interest in scientific subjects 
which arose during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and 
of the new French military needs. Many of these institutions 
have persisted to the present, so well have they answered the sci- 
entific interests and needs of the nation. A mere list of the insti- 
tutions created is all that need be given. These were: 

Museum or Conservatory of Arts (Jan. i6, 1794). 

Conservatory of Arts and Trades (Oct. 10, 1794). 

New medical schools {Schools of Health) ordered (Dec. 4, 1794). 

Museum of Natural History (Dec. 11, 1794). 

Central Schools to succeed the former Colleges (secondary schools) 

(Feb. 25, 1795). 
School of Living Oriental Languages (March 30, 1795). 
Veterinary Schools (April 21, 1795). 
Course in Archaeology, National Library (June 8, 1795). 
Bureau of Longitude (June 29, 1795). 
Conservatory of Music (Aug. 3, 1795). 
The National Library (Oct. 17, 1795). 
Museum of Archaeological Monuments (Oct. 20, 1795). 
Polytechnic Schools (R. 257) ; School of Civil Engineering; School of 

Hydrographic Engineers; and School of Mining (Oct. 22, 1795). 

The Convention also adopted the metric system of weights and 
measures; enacted laws under which the peasants could acquire 
title to the lands they had tilled for so long; and began the unifica- 
tion of the laws of the different parts of the country into a single 
set, which later culminated in the Code Napoleon. 

4. The Directory (1795-99) and the Consulate (i 799-1804), 
The Revolution had by this time largely spent itself, the Direc- 
tory followed, and in 1799 Napoleon became First Consul and for 
the next sixteen years was master of France. The Law of 1795 
for primary schools (R. 258 b) was but feebly administered under 
the Directory, as foreign wars absorbed the energies and re- 
sources of the Government. Napoleon's chief educational inter- 
est, too, was in opening up opportunities for talent to rise, in en- 
couraging scientific work and higher specialized institutions, and 
in developing schools of a type that would support the kind of 
government he had imposed upon France. The secondary and 
higher schools he established and promoted cost him money at a 
time when money was badly needed for national defense, and 
primary education was accordingly neglected during the time he 
directed the destinies of the nation. His educational organiza- 
tions and work we shall refer to again in a later chapter. 

The Revolutionary enthusiasts had stated clearlv their theory 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 519 

of republican education, but had failed to establish a permanent 
state school system according to their plans. This now became 
the work of the nineteenth century. In the meantime, in the new 
United States of America the same ideas were taking shape and 
finding expression, and to the developments there we next turn. 

III. THE NEW STATE THEORY IN AMERICA 

Waning of the old religious interest. As early as 1647 Rhode 
Island Colony had enacted the first law providing for freedom of 
religious worship ever enacted by an Enghsh-speaking people, 
and two years later Maryland enacted a similar law. Though the 
Maryland law was later repealed, and a rigid Church-of-England 
rule established there, these laws were indicative of the new spirit 
arising in the New World, ^y the beginning of the eighteenth 
century a change in attitude toward the old problem of personal 
salvation had become evident. Frontier conditions; the gradual 
rise of a civil as opposed to a religious form of town government; 
the rising interests in trade and shipping; the beginnings of the 
breakdown of the old aristocratic traditions and customs trans- 
planted from Europe; the rising individualism in both Europe 
and America — - these all helped to/Weaken the hold on the people 
of the old religious doctrines. -/ 

By 1750 the change in religious thinking in the American Colo- 
nies had become quite marked. ^ Especially was this change evi- 
denced in the dying-out of the old religious fervor and intolerance, 
anjd th€ breaking-up of the old religious solidarity. While most 
of the Colonies continued to maintain an ''established Church," 
other sects had to be admitted to the Colony and given freedom of 
worship. The Puritan monopoly in New England was broken, as 
was also that of the Anglican faith in the central Colonies. The 
day of the monopoly of any sect in a Colony was over. New secu- 
lar interests began to take the place of reUgion as the chief topic of 
thought and conversation, and secular books began to dispute the 
earlier predominance of the Bible. A few colonial newspapers 
had begun (seven by 1750), and these became expressive of the 
new colony interests. 

Changing character of the schools. These changes in attitude 
toward the old reHgious problems materially affected both the 

^ "The commercial depression of 1740 fell upon a generation of New Englanders 
whose minds no longer dwelt preeminently upon religious matters, but who were, 
on the contrary, preeminently commercial in their interests." (Green. M. L., 
Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut, p. 226.) 



520 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

support and the character of the education provided in the Colo- 
nies. The Law of 1647, requiring the maintenance of the Latin 
grammar schools, had been found to be increasingly difficult of 
enforcement, not only in Massachusetts, but in all the other New 
England Colonies which had followed the Massachusetts exam- 
ple. With the changing attitude of the people, which had become 
clearly manifest by 1750, the demand for reHef from the mainte- 
nance of this school in favor of a more practical and less aristo- 
cratic type of higher school, if higher school were needed at all, 
became marked. By the close of the colonial period the new 
American Academy (p. 463), with its more practical studies, had 
begun to supersede the old Latin grammar school. 

The elementary school experienced something of the same difiEi- 
:ulties. Many of the parochial schools died out, while others de- 
clined in character and importance. In Church-of-England Colo- 
nies all elementary education was left to private initiative and 
philanthropic and rehgious effort (p. 373). In the southern Colo- 
nies the classes in society and the character of the plantation life 
made common schools impossible, and the feeling of any need for 
elementary schools almost entirely died out. In New England 
the eighteenth century was a continual struggle on the one hand 
to prevent the original religious town school from disappearing, 
and on the other to establish in its place a series of scattered and 
inferior district schools, while either church or town support and 
tuition fees became ever harder to obtain. Among other changes 
of importance the reading school and the writing school now be- 
came definitely united, in all the smaller places and in the rural 
districts, as a measure of economy, to form the American school 
of the "3 Rs." New textbooks, too, containing less of the gloom- 
ily religious than the New England Primer, and secular rather 
than religious in character (p. 443), appeared after 1750 and be- 
gan to be used in the schools. After 1750, too, it was increasingly 
evident that the old religious enthusiasm for schools had largely 
died out; that European traditions and ways and types of schools 
no longer completely satisfied; and that the period of the trans- 
planting of European educational ideas and schools and types of 
instruction was coming to an end. Instead, the evolution of a 
pubHc or state school out of the original religious school, and the 
beginnings of the evolution of distinctly American types of 
schools, better adapted to American needs, became increasingly 
evident in the Colonies as the eighteenth century progressed. 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 521 

Rise of the civil or state school. As has been stated earlier, the 
school everywhere in America arose as a child of the Church. In 
the Middle Colonies, where the parochial-school conception of edu- 
cation was the prevailing type, the school remained under church 
control until after the foundation of our national government. 
In New England, though — and the New England evolution in 
time became the prevaiHng American practice — the school passed 
through a very interesting development during colonial times. 

As we have seen (p. 360), each little New England town was 
originally estabUshed as a Uttle religious repubHc, with the 
Church in complete control. The governing authorities for 
church and civil affairs were much the same. When acting as 
church ofhcers they were known as Elders and Deacons; when 
acting as civil or town ofhcers they were known as Selectmen. 
The State, as represented in the colony legislature or the town 
meeting, was clearly the servant of the Church, and existed in 
large part for rehgious ends. It was the State acting as the serv- 
ant of the Church which enacted the Massachusetts laws of 1642 
and 1647 (Rs. 190, 191), requiring the towns to maintain schools 
for religious ends. Now, so close was the connection between the 
religious town, which controlled church affairs, and the civil 
town, which looked after roads, fences, taxes, and defense — the 
constituency of both being one and the same, and the meetings of 
both being held at first in the meeting-house — ■ that when the 
schools were established the colony legislature placed them under 
the civil — as involving taxes, and being a public service — 
rather than under the religious town. The interests of one were 
the interests of both, and, being the same in constituency and 
territorial boundaries, there seemed no occasion for friction or 
fear. From this religious beginning the civil school and the civil 
school- town and school- township, with all their elaborate school 
administrative machinery, were later evolved. 

The erection of a town hall, separate from the meeting-house, 
was a first step in the process. School affairs now were discussed 
at the town hall, instead of in the church. The town authorities 
now appointed committees to locate and build schoolhouses, se- 
lect and certificate the teachers, and visit and examine the school. 
Next a regular town school committee was provided for. To this 
was given the management of the town school, and town taxes, 
instead of church taxes, were voted for buildings and maintenance. 
The minister continued to certificate the grammar-school master 



522 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

until the close of the colonial period, but the power to certificate 
the elementary-school teachers passed to the town authorities 
early in the eighteenth century. By the close of the century all 
that the minister — ■ as the only surviving representative of church 
control — had left to him was the right to accompany the town 
authorities in the visitation of schools. Thus gradually but cer- 
tainly did the earlier religious school in America pass out from 
under the control of the Church and come under the control of the 
State. When our national government and the different state 
governments were established, the States were ready to accept, in 
principle at least, the theory gradually worked out in New Eng- 
land that schools are state institutions, and should be under the 
control of the State. 

The early state constitutions and laws. In framing the Federal 
Constitution, in 1787, education, then being regarded largely as a 
local matter, was left to the States to handle as they saw fit; so we 
turn to the early state constitutions and laws to see how far the 
new American States had, by the close of the eighteenth century, 
advanced toward the conception of education as an affair of the 
State. 

During the period from the Declaration of Independence to the 
close of the eighteenth century (1776-1800), all the States, except 
Rhode Island and Connecticut, which considered their colonial 
charters as satisfactory, formulated and adopted new state con- 
stitutions. Three new States — Vermont, Kentucky, and Ten- 
nessee — were admitted to the Union before 1800, and these 
framed constitutions also. Of the sixteen States forming the 
Union by 1800, seven had incorporated into their constitutions a 
clause setting forth the State's duty in the matter of education 
(R. 259). As in the earlier period of American education, it was 
Calvinistic New England which incorporated into the constitu- 
tions the best provisions regarding learning. In the parochial- 
school central Colonies the mention was much less emphatic, while 
the old Anglican- Church Colonies and the new States of Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee remained silent on the subject. Massachu- 
setts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, in particular, incorporated 
strong sections directing the encouragement of learning and vir- 
tue, the protection and fostering of school societies, and the es- 
tabhshment of schools. The Massachusetts provision, after- 
wards copied by New Hampshire, is so explicit in the matter of 
state duty that it is worth quoting in full. 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 523 

Chap. V, Sec. 2. Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused 
generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preser- 
vation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading 
the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of 
the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall h( 
the duty of the legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods ol 
this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sci- 
ences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cam- 
bridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage 
private societies and public institutions, by rewards and immunities, 
for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, 
manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance 
and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, 
public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctu- 
ality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections 
and generous sentiments among the people. 

Though the Federal Constitution made no provision for educa- 
tion or aid to schools, when the Congress of the Confederation, in 
1787, adopted the Ordinance for the organization and govern- 
ment of the Northwest Territory, out of which the States of Ohio, 
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were later carved, it 
prefixed to this Ordinance the following significant provision : 

Art. 3. Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good 
government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of 
education shall forever be encouraged [in the States to be formed from 
this Territory]. 

By the time the first State formed from this western territory was 
ready to be admitted to the Union (Ohio, 1802), the theory that 
education is a function of the State had come to be so thoroughly 
accepted, in principle at least, by the new American people that 
Congress now began a policy, ever since continued, of aiding each 
new State to establish and maintain a state system of schools. To 
this end Congress gave the new State for this purpose a generous 
endowment of national land, and in addition three townships of 
land to endow a state university. We also find that the constitu- 
tions of the first States created from this new Northwest Territory 
(Ohio, 1802; Indiana, 1816^) contain for the time good provisions 
relating to public education. The Ohio provisions (R. 260) are 
noteworthy for the strong stand for religious freedom and against 

1 Prominent in the Indiana constitutional convention of 1816 were a number of 
Frenchmen of bearing and abihty, then residing in the old territorial capital — 
Vincennes. How much they influenced the statement of the article on education is 
liot known, but it reads as though French revolutionary ideas had been influential 
in shaping it. 



524 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

any discrimination in the schools between rich and poor, while the 
Indiana provisions (R. 261) are marked for their broad and gener- 
ous conception of the scope and purpose of a state system of pub- 
lic instruction. 

Many of the older States enacted general state school laws 
early in their history (R. 262). Connecticut continued the gen- 
eral school laws of 1700, 171 2, and 17 14 unchanged, and in 1795 
added $1,200, 000, derived from land sales, to a permanent state 
school endowment fund, created as early as 1750. Vermont en- 
acted a general school law in 1782. Massachusetts and New 
Hampshire enacted new general school laws, in 1789, which re- 
stated and legaKzed the school development of the preceding hun- 
dred and fifty years. All these required the maintenance of 
schools by the towns for a definite term each year, ordered taxa- 
tion, and fixed the school studies required by the State. New 
York, in 1784, created an administrative organization, known as 
the University of the State of New York, to supervise secondary 
and higher education throughout the State — an institution 
clearly modeled after the centralizing ideas of Condorcet, Rol- 
land, and Diderot (p. 477), and very similar to the ideas proposed 
by Talleyrand and Condorcet and later (1808) embodied in the 
University of France by Napoleon. In 1795 New York also pro- 
vided for a state system of elementary education. Georgia cre- 
ated a state system of academies, as early as 1783. Delaware 
created a state school fund, in 1796, and Virginia enacted an op- 
tional school law the same year. North Carolina created a state 
university, as early as 1795. 

The new political motive for schools. We thus see, in the new 
United States, the theories of the French revolutionary thinkers 
and statesmen actually being realized in practice. The constitu- 
tional provisions, and even the legislation, often were in advance 
of what the States, impoverished as they were by the War of In- 
dependence, could at once carry out, but they mark the evolution 
in America of a clearly defined state theory as to education, and 
the recognition of a need for general education in a government 
whose actions were so largely influenced by the force of public 
opinion. The Federal Constitution had extended the right to 
vote for national officers to all, and the older States soon began to 
remove their earlier property qualifications for voting and to ex- 
tend general manhood suffrage to all citizens. 

This new development in government by tlie people, which 



iBEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 525 



meant the passing of the rule of a propertied and educated class 
and the establishment of a real democracy, caused the leading 
American statesmen to turn early to general education as a neces- 
sity for repubHcan safety. In his Farewell Address to the Ameri- 
can people, written in 1796, Washington said: 

Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for 
the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of 
a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public 
opinion should be enlightened. 

Jefferson spent the years 1784 to 1789 in Paris, and became 
a great propagandist in America for French political ideas. 
Writing to James Madison from France, as early as 1787, he 
said: 

Above all things, I hope the education of the common people will 
be attended to ; con\inced that on this good sense we may rely with the 
most security for the preservation of a due sense of liberty. 

In 1779, then, as a member of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson 
tried unsuccessfully to secure the passage of a comprehensive bill, 
after the plan of the French Revolutionary proposals, for the or- 
ganization of a complete system of 
pubUc education for Virginia. The 
essential features of the proposed bill 
(R. 263) were that every county 
should be laid off into school dis- 
tricts, five to six miles square, to be 
known as "hundreds," and in each 
of these an elementary school was to 
be estabhshed to which any citizen 
could send his children free of charge 
for three years, and as much longer 
as he was willing to pay tuition ; that 
the leading pupil in each school was 
to be selected annually and sent to 
one of twenty grammar (secondary) 
schools to be established and maintained at various points in the 
State; after two. years the leaders in each of these schools were 
to be selected and further educated free for six years, the less 
promising being sent home; and at the completion of the grammar- 
school course, the upper half of tlie pupils were to be given three 
years more of free education at the State College of William and 




Fig. 



162. Thomas Jefferson 
(1743-1826) 



526 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Mary, and the other half were to be employed as teachers for 
the schools of the State. ^ 

Though the scheme failed of approval, Jefferson never lost in- 
terest in the education of the people for intelligent participation 
in the functions of government. Writing from Monticello to 
Colonel Yancey, in 1816, after his retirement from the presidency, 
he wrote: 

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization it 
expects what never was and never will be. . . . There is no safe deposit 
(for the functions of government) but with the people themselves; 
nor can they be safe with them without information. 

In 1 8 19 the founding of the University of Virginia crowned Jef- 

/ ferson's efforts for education by the State. This institution, 

-- the Declaration of Independence, and the statute for religious 

C freedom in Virginia stand to-day as the three enduring monu- 

/ ments to his memory.^ 

Other of the early American statesmen expressed similar views 

as to the importance of general education by the State. John 

Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States, in a letter to his 

friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, wrote: 

/ I consider knowledge to be the soul of a Republic, and as the weak 
( and the wicked are generally in alliance, as much care should be taken 
) to diminish the number of the former as of the latter. Education is the 
' way to do this, and nothing should be left undone to afford all ranks 
! of people the means of obtaining a proper degree of it at a cheap and 
easy rate. 

James Madison, fourth President of the United States, wrote: 

A satisfactory plan for primary education is certainly a vital desid- 
eratum in our republics. 

A popular government without popular information or the means of 
acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or, perhaps, both. 
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to 
be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which 
knowledge gives. 

John Adams, with true New England thoroughness, expressed 
the new motive for education still more forcibly when he wrote: 

^ For the original Bill of 1779 in full, in the original spelling, see the Biennial 
Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for Virginia, 1900-01, pp. Ixx-lxxv. 

2 Though Jefferson had been Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War; 
had repeatedly served in the Virginia legislature and in Congress; and had twice 
been President of the United States, he counted all these as of less importance than 
the three services mentioned, and in preparing the inscription to be placed on his 
tomb he included only these three. 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 527 

The instruction of the people in every kind of knowledge that can 
be of use to them in the practice of their moral duties as men, citizens, 
and Christians, and of their political and civil duties as members of 
society and freemen, ought to be the care of the public, and of all who 
have any share in the conduct of its affairs, in a manner that never yet 
has been practiced in any age or nation. The education here intended 
is not merely that of the children of the rich and noble, but of every 
rank and class of people, down to the lowest and poorest. It is not too 
much to say that schools for the education of all should be placed at 
convenient distances and maintained at the public expense. The 
revenues of the State would be applied infinitely better, more chari- 
tably, wisely, usefully, and therefore politically in this way than even 
in maintaining the poor. This would be the best way of preventing 
the existence of the poor. . . . 

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower 
classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that, to a humane 
and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought 
extravagant. 

Having founded, as Lincoln so well said later at Gettysburg, 
''on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedi- 
cated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and hav- 
ing built a constitutional form of government based on that 
equality, it in time became evident to those who thought at all on 
the question that that liberty and political equality could not be 
preserved without the general education of all. A new motive 
for education was thus created and gradually formulated in the 
United States, as well as in revolutionary France, and the nature 
of the school instruction of the youth of the State came in time to 
be colored through and through by this new political motive. 
The necessary schools, though, did not come at once. On the 
contrary, the struggle to establish these necessary schools it will 
be our purpose to trace in subsequent chapters, but before doing 
so we wish first to point out how the rise of a political theory for 
education led to the development of a theory as to the nature 
of the educational process which exercised a far-reaching in- 
fluence on all subsequent evolution of schools and teaching. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. What do the proposals of La Chalotais, RoUand, and Turgot indicate 
as to the degree of unification of France attained by the time they wrote? 

2. What new subjects did Diderot add to the religious elementary school 
of his time? 

3. Show how the decline in efficiency of the Jesuits was a stimulating force 
for the evolution of a system of pubUc instruction in France. 



528 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

4. Show the statesman-like character of the proposals made in the legisla- 
tive assemblies of France for the organization of national education. 

5. Assuming that there had been peace, and funds to carry out the law 
(1793) of the Convention for primary instruction, what other difficulties 
would have been met that would have been hard to surmount? 

6. Compare the Lakanal school with an American elementary school of a 
half-century ago. 

7. Show that many of the important educational reforms of Napoleon were 
foreshadowed in the National Convention. 

8. Was Napoleon right in his attitude toward education and schools? 

9. Explain the lack of success of the revolutionary theorists in the estab- 
lishment of a state system of education. 

10. Explain why the breakdown of the old religious intolerance came earlier 
in the American Colonies than in the Old World. 

11. Show the great value of the Laws of 1642 and 1647 in holding New Eng- 
land true to the maintenance of schools during the period of decline. 

1 2 . What might have been the result in America had the New England Colo- 
nies established the school as a parish institution, as did the central 
Colonies? 

13. Analyze the Massachusetts constitutional provision for education, and 
show what it provided for. 

14. Show the similarity of the University of the State of New York to the 
proposals for governmental control in France. 

15. Explain why the French revolutionary ideas as to education were realized 
so easily in the new United States, whereas France did not realize them 
until well into the nineteenth century. 

16. Compare Jefferson's proposed law with the proposals of Talleyrand for 
France. 

17. Just what type of educational institutions did Washington have in mind 
in the quotation from his Farewell Address? John Jay? John Adams? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are repro- 
duced : 

254. Dabney: The Far-Reaching Influence of Rousseau's Writings. 

255. La Chalotais: Essay on National Education. 

256. Condorcet: Outline of a Plan for Organizing Public Instruction in 

France. 

257. Report: Founding of the Polytechnic School at Paris. 

258. Barnard: Work of the National Convention in France. 

{a) Various legislative proposals. 

{b) The Law of 1795 organizing Primary Instruction. 

259. American States: Early Constitutional Provisions relating to Edu- 

cation. 

260. Ohio: Educational Provisions of First Constitution. 

261. Indiana: Educational Provisions of First Constitution. 

262. American States: Early School Legislation in. _ 

263. Jefferson: Plan for Organizing Education in Virginia. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

I. Explain the conditions of society under which the emotional writings of 
a man of the type of Rousseau could have made such a deep impression 
(254) on the nation. 



BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION 529 

2. In how far do nations to-day accept the theories of La Chalotais (255)? 

3. What type of administrative organization was proposed by Condorcet 
(256)? 

4. What does the founding of the Polytechnic School (257) indicate as to 
the French interest in science? 

5. What real progress was made by the National Convention (258 a), and 
to what degree did it fail? 

6. Explain the type of school system proposed and the conception of edu- 
cation lying behind the early constitutional provisions (259) for educa- 
tion in each of the American States. 

7. In what respects were the educational provisions of the first Ohio con- 
stitution (260) remarkable? 

8. In what respects were the educational provisions of the first Indiana 
constitution (261) remarkable? 

9. Characterize the early school legislation reproduced (262). 

10. Just what type of educational system did Jefferson propose to organize 
in Virginia (263)? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Barnard, Henry. American Journal of Education, vol. 22, pp. 651-64. 
Compayre, G. History of Pedagogy, chapters 15, 16, 17. 
Cubberley, E. P. Public Education in the United States, chapter 3. 



CHAPTER XXI 

A NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER FOR THE 
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 

In chapters xvii and xviii we traced the development of educa- 
tional theory up to the point where John Locke left it (p. 436) 
after outlining his social and disciplinary theory for the educa- 
tional process, and in the chapter preceding this one we traced the 
evolution of a new state theory as to the purpose of education to 
replace the old religious theory. The new theory as to state con- 
trol, and the erection of a citizenship purpose for education, made 
it both possible and desirable that the instruction in the school, 
and particularly in the vernacular school, should be recast, both in 
method and content, to bring the school into harmony with the 
new secular purpose. In consequence, an important reorgan- 
ization of the vernacular school now took place, and to this 
transformation of the elementary school we next turn. 

I. THE NEW THEORY STATED 

Iconoclastic nature of the work of Rousseau. The inspirer of 
the new theory as to the purpose of education was none other 
than the French-Swiss iconoclast and political writer, Jean- Jacques 
Rousseau, whose work as a political theorist we have previ- 
ously described. Happening to take up the educational problem 
as a phase of his activity against the political and social and 
ecclesiastical conditions of his age, drawing freely on Locke's 
Thoughts for ideas, and inspired by a feehng that so corrupt and 
debased was his age that if he rejected everything accepted by it 
and adopted the opposite he would reach the truth, Rousseau re- 
stated his political theories as to the control of man by society 
and his ideas as to a Hfe according to " nature " in a book in which 
he described the education, from birth to manhood, of an imagi- 
nary boy, Emile, and his future wife, Sophie. In the first sentence 
of the book Rousseau sets forth his fundamental thesis: 

All is good as it comes from the hand of the Creator; all degenerates 
under the hands of man. He forces one country to produce the fruits 
of another, one tree to bear that of another. He confounds climates, 
elements, and seasons; he mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave; turns 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 531 




Fig. 163. The Rousseau 
Monument at Geneva 



everything topsy-turvy, disfigures everything. He will have nothing 
as nature made it, not even man himself; he must be trained like a 
managed horse, trimmed like a tree in a garden. 

His book, published in 1762, in no sense outlined a workable 
system of education. Instead, in charming literary style, with 
much sophistry, many paradoxes, numerous irrelevant digressions 
upon topics having no relation 
to education, and in no system- 
atic order, Rousseau presented his 
ideas as to the nature and purpose 
of education. Emphasizing the 
importance of the natural devel- 
opment of the child (R. 264 a), 
he contended that the three great 
teachers of man were nature, man, 
and experience, and that the sec- 
ond and third tended to destroy 
the value of the first (R. 264 b); 
that the child should be handled 
in a new way, and that the most 
important item in his training up 

to twelve years of age was to do nothing (R. 264 c, d) so that 
nature might develop his character properly (R. 264 e) ; and that 
from twelve to fifteen his education should be largely from things 
and nature, and not from books (R. 264 f). As the outcome of 
such an education Rousseau produced a boy who, from his point 
of view, would at eighteen still be natural (R. 264 g) and un- 
spoiled by the social life about him, which, after all, he felt was 
soon to pass away (R. 264 i). The old religious instruction he 
would completely supersede (R. 264 h). 

So depraved was the age, and so wretched were the educational 
practices of his time, that, in spite of the malevolent impulse 
which was his driving force, what he wrote actually contained 
many excellent ideas, pointed the way to better practices, and be- 
came an inspiration for others who, unlike Rousseau, were deeply 
interested in problems of education and child welfare. One can- 
not study Rousseau's writings as a whole, see him in his eight- 
eenth-century setting, know of his personal life, and not feel that 
the far-reaching reforms produced by his Emile are among the 
strangest facts in history. 

The valuable elements in Rousseau's work. Amid his glitter- 



532 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ing generalities and striking paradoxes Rousseau did, however, 
set forth certain important ideas as to the proper education of 
children. Popularizing the best ideas of the EngHshman, Locke 
(p. 433), Rousseau may be said to have given currency to certain 
' conceptions as to the education of children which, in the hands of 
V^ others, brought about great educational changes. Briefly stated, 
these were: 

1. The replacement of authority by reason and investigation. 

2. That education should be adapted to the gradually unfolding 
/ capacities of the child. 

/ 3. That each age in the life of a child has activities which are normal 
( to that age, and that education should seek for and follow these. 

I 4. That physical activity and health are of first importance. 

;. That education, and especially elementary education, should take 

place through the senses, rather than through the memory. 
I. That the emphasis placed on the memory in education is funda- 
mentally wrong, dwarfing the judgment and reason of the child- 
■. That catechetical and Jesuitical types of education should be 
abandoned. 

■ ~ 8. That the study of theological subtleties is unsuited to child needs 
/ or child capacity. 

\ 9. That the natural interests, curiosity, and activities of children 
/ should be utilized in their education. 

\ 10. That the normal activities of children call for expression, and that 
rji the best means of utilizing these activities are conversation, 

X^ writing, drawing, music, and play. 

. II. That education should no longer be exclusively literary and lin- 
/ guistic, but should be based on sense perception, expression, and 

f reasoning, 

'\ 12. That such education calls for instruction in the book of nature, 
with home geography and the investigation of elementary prob- 
lems in science occupying a prominent place. 

13. That the child be taught rather than the subject-matter; life 
/I here rather than hereafter; and the development of reason rather 
[ ' than the loading of the memory, were the proper objects of edu- 
cation. 

14. That a many-sided education is necessary to reveal child possi- 
n bilities; to correct the narrowing effect of specialized class educa- 
tion; and to prepare one for possible changes in fortune. 

A new educational ideal presented. Rousseau's Emile pre- 
sented a new ideal in education. According to his conception it 
was debasing that man should be educated to behave correctly in 
an artificial society, to follow bhndly the doctrines of a faith, or to 
be an obedient subject of a king, \/lnstead he conceived the func- 
tion of education to be to evolve the natural powers, cultivate the 
human side, unfold the inborn capacities of every human being, 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 533 

and to develop a reasoning individual, capable of intelligently 
directing his life under diverse conditions and in any form of 
society. A book setting forth such ideas naturally was revolu- 
tionary ^ in matters of education. It deeply influenced thinkers 
along these lines during the remaining years of the eighteenth 
century, and became the inspiring source of nineteenth-century 
reforms. As Rousseau's Social Contract became the politica'-\ 
handbook of the French Revolutionists, so his Entile became the 
inspiration of a new theory as to the education of children. 

Coming, as it did, at a time when poHtical and ecclesiastical 
despotisms were fast breaking down in France, when new forces 
were striving for expression throughout Europe, and when new 
theories as to the functions of government were being set forth in 
the American Colonies and in France, it gave the needed inspira- 
tion for the evolution of a new theory of non-religious, universal, 
and democratic education which would prepare citizens for intelli- 
gent participation in the functions of a democratic State, and for 
a reorganization of the subject-matter of education itself. A new 
theory as to the educational purpose was soon to arise, and the 
whole nature of the educational process, in the hands of others, 
was soon to be transformed as a result of the fortunate conjunc- 
tion of the iconoclastic and impractical discussion of education by 
Rousseau and the more practical work of EngHsh, French, and 
American poHtical theorists and statesmen. Out of tlie fusing of 
these, modern educational theory arose. 

II. GERMAN ATTEMPTS TO WORK OUT A NEW THEORY 

Influence of the Emile in German lands. The Entile was 
widely read, not only in France, but throughout the continent of 
Europe as well. In German lands its pubHcation coincided with 
the rising tide of nationalism — the ''Period of Enhghtenment " 

^ '' As a man who sought after glory, and whose gloomy temper took umbrage at 
everything, Rousseau complained that his Emile did not obtain the same success 
as his other writings. He was truly hard to please! The anger of some, the ardent 
sympathy of others; on the one hand, the parliamentary decrees condemning the 
book and issuing a warrant for the author's arrest, the thunders of the Church, and 
the famous mandate of the Archbishop of Paris; on the other hand, the applause 
of the philosophers, of Clairant, Duclos, and d'Alembert, — what more, then, did 
he want? Emile was burned in Paris and Geneva, but it was read with passion; it 
was twice translated in London, an honor which- no French work had received up 
to then. In truth never did a book make more noise and thrust itself so much on 
the attention of men. By its defects, no less than by its qualities, by the inspired 
and prophetic character of its style, as well as by the paradoxical audacity of its 
ideas, Emile swayed opinion and stirred up the more generous parts of the human 
soul," (COTOPavTe- G.. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. loo.) 



534 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

— and the book was warmly welcomed by such (then young) 
men as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Richter, Fichte, and Kant. It 
presented a new ideal of education and a new ideal for humanity, 
and its ideas harmonized well with those of the newly created 
aristocracy of worth which the young German enthusiasts were 
busily engaged in proclaiming for their native land. The ideal of 
the perfected individual, strong in the consciousness of his powers, 
now found expression in the new "classics of individuaHsm " 
which marked the outburst of the best that German literature has 
ever produced. As Paulsen ^ well says: 

Rousseau exercised an immense influence on his times, and Germany 
was stirred perhaps even more deeply than France. In France Vol- 
taire continued to be regarded as the great man of his time, whereas, in 
Germany, his place in the esteem of the younger generation had been 
taken by the enthusiast of Geneva. Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, 
Fichte, all of them were roused by Rousseau to the inmost depths of 
their natures. He gave utterance to the passionate longing of their 
souls: to do away with the imitation of French courtly culture, by 
which Nature was suppressed and perverted in every way, to do away 
with the established political and social order, based on court society 
and class distinctions, which was felt to be lowering to man in his 
quahty as a reasonable being, and to return to Nature, to simple and 
unsophisticated habits of life, or rather to find a way through Nature 
to a better civilisation, which would restore the natural values of life 
to their rightful place and would be compatible with truth and virtue, 
sincerity and probity of character. 

The great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), 
was so deeply stirred by the Emile that the regularity of his daily 
walks and the clearness of his thinking were disturbed by it. 
Goethe called the book "the teacher's Gospel." Schiller praised 
Rousseau as "a new Socrates, who of Christians wished to make 
men." Herder acclaimed Rousseau as a German, and his "di- 
vine work " as his guide. Jean-Paul Richter confessed himself 
indebted to Rousseau for the best ideas in his Levana. Lavater 
declared himself ready for a Reformation in education along the 
lines laid down by Rousseau. 

Basedow and his work. Perhaps the most important practical 
influence exerted by the Emile in German lands came in the work 
of Johann Bernard Basedow and his followers. Basedow was a 
North German who had been educated in the Gymnasium at 
Hamburg, had studied in the theological faculty at Leipzig, had 
*been a tutor in a nobleman's family, and had been a teacher in a 

1 Paulsen, Fr., German Education, Past and Present, p. 157. 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 535 



Ritierakademie in Denmark and the Gymnasium at Altona. 
Deeply imbued with the new scientific spirit, in thorough revolt 
against the dominance of the Church in human Hves, and incited 
to new efforts by his reading of the 
Emile, Basedow thought out a plan 
for a reform school which should put 
many of Rousseau's ideas into prac- 
tice. In 1768 he issued his Address 
to Philanthropists and Men of Prop- 
erty on Schools and Studies and their 
Influence on the Public Weal, in which 
he appealed for funds to enable him 
to open a school to try out his ideas, 
and to enable him to prepare a new 
type of textbooks for the use of 
schools. He proposed in this appeal 
to organize a school which should be 
non-sectarian, and also advocated the creation of a National 
Council of Education to have charge of all public instruction. 
These were essentially the ideas of the French political reformers 
of the time. The appeal was widely scattered, awakened much 
enthusiasm, and subscriptions to assist him poured in from many 




Fig. 164. B.^SEDOW 
(1723-90) 



, 1 



sources. 

In 1774 Basedow pubHshed two works of more than ordinary 
importance. The first, a Book of Method for Fathers and Mothers 
of Families and of Nations, was a book for adults^ and outlined a \ 
plan of education for both boys and girls. The keynotes were u 
"following nature," "impartial religious instruction," children to u 
be dealt with as children, learning through the senses, language | 
instruction by a natural method, and much study of natural ob- j 
jects. The ideas were a combination of those of Bacon, Come- - 
nius, and Rousseau. The second book, in four volumes, and con- 
taining one hundred copper-plate illustrations, was the famous 
Elementary Work (Elementarwerk mit Kupfern) (R. 266), the 
first illustrated school textbook since the Orhis Pictus (1654) of 
Comenius. This work of Basedow's became, in German lands, 

1 Within three years Basedow had collected seven thousand Reichsthaler, sub- 
scriptions coming to him from such widely scattered sources as Joseph II of Austria, 
Empress Catherine of Russia, King Christian VII of Denmark, "the wealthy class 
in Basle," the Abbot of the monastery of Einsiedel in Switzerland, "the royal gov- 
ernment of Osnabruck," the Grand Prince Paul, and others. Jews and Freemasons 
seem to have taken particular interest in his ideas. Freemason lodges in Hamburg, 
Leipzig, and Gottingen were among the generous contributors. 



536 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the Orbis Pictus of the eighteenth century. By means of its 
/ "natural methods" (R. 265) children were to be taught to read, 
both the vernacular and Latin, more easily and in less time than 
had been done before, and in addition were to be given a knowl- 
edge of morals, commerce, scientific subjects, and social usages by 
"an incomparable method," founded on experience in teaching 
children. The book enjoyed a wide circulation among the middle 

» and upper classes in German lands. 

Basedow's Philanthropinum. In 1774 Prince Leopold, of Des- 
sau, a town in the duchy of Anhalt, in northern Germany, gave 
Basedow the use of two buildings and a garden, and twelve thou- 

'/ sand thalers in money, with which to establish his long-heralded 

f Philanthropinum, which was to be an educational institution of a 
new type. Great expectations were aroused, and a widespread 
interest in the new school awakened. Education according to na- 
ture, with a reformed, time-saving, natural method for the teach- 
ing of languages, were to be its central ideas. Children were to 
be treated as children, and not as adults. Powdered hair, gilded 
coats, swords, rouge, and hoops were to be discarded for short 
hair, clean faces, sailor jackets, and caps, while the natural plays 
of children and directed physical training were to be made a fea- 
ture of the instruction. The languages were to be taught by con- 
versational methods. Each child was to be taught a handicraft 
— turning, planing, and carpentering were provided — for both 
social and educational reasons. Instruction in real things — 
science, nature — was to take the place of instruction in words, 
and the vernacular was to be the language of instruction. The 
institution was to have the atmosphere of rehgion, but was not 
to be Cathohc, Lutheran, Reformed, or Jewish, and was to be 
free from "theologizing distinctions." Latin, German, French, 
mathematics, a knowledge of nature (geography, physics, natural 

'; history), music, dancing, drawing, and physical training were the 
principal subjects of instruction. The children were divided into 
four classes, and the instruction for each, with the textbooks to be 
used, was outlined (R. 265). 

The school opened with Basedow and three assistants as teach- 
ers, and two of Basedow's children and twelve others as pupils. 
Later the school came to have many boarding pupils, drawn from 
as far-distant points as Riga and Spain. In 1776 a pubHc exami- 
nation was held, to which many distinguished men were invited, 
and the work which Basedow's methods could produce was ex- 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 537 




Fig. 165 

Immanuel Kant 

(17 24-1804) 



hibited. These methods seem to have been successful, judging 

from the rather full accounts which have been left us.^ The 

school represented a new type of educational effort, and was 

frankly experimental in purpose. It was 

an attempt to apply, in practice, the main 

ideas of Rousseau's Emile. Basedow tried 

the plan of education outlined by Rousseau 

with his own daughter, whom he named 

EmiHe. 

As a promising experiment the school 
awakened widespread interest, and Base- 
dow was supported by such thinkers of the 
time as Goethe and Kant. The year fol- 
lowing the ''Examination" Kant, then pro- 
fessor of philosophy at the University of 
Konigsberg, contributed an article to the 
Konigsberg Gazette exj^laining the impor- 
tance of the experiment Basedow was mak- 
ing. Still later, in his university lectures On Pedagogy, he further 
stated the importance of such a new experiment, in the following 
words: 

It was imagined that experiments in education were not necessary; 
and that, whether any thing in it was good or bad, could be judged of 
by the reason. But this was a* great mistake; e.xperience shows very 
often that results are produced precisely the opposite to those which 
had been expected. We also see from experiment that one generation 
cannot work out a complete plan of education. The only experi- 
mental school which has made a beginning toward breaking the path 
was the Dessau institution. This praise must be given to it, in spite 
of the many faults which may be charged against it; faults which be- 
long to all conclusions based upon such undertakings; and which make 
new experiments always necessary. It was the only school in which 
the teachers had the liberty to work after their own methods and 
plans, and where they stood in connection, not only with each other, 
but with men of learning throughout all Germany. 

Basedow's influence, and followers. Basedow, though, was an 
impractical theorist, boastful and quarrelsome, vulgar and coarse, 
given to drunkenness and intemperate speech, and fond of making 
claims for his work which the results did not Justify. In a few 
years he had been displaced as director, and in 1793 the Philan- 
thropinum closed its doors. The school, nevertheless, was a very 

1 See Barnard's American Journal of Education, vol. v, pp. 487-520, for an ac- 
count of the examinatiens and the institution. 



538 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

important educational experiment, and Basedow's work for a 
time exerted a profound influence on German pedagogical thought. 
He may be said to have raised instruction in the Realien in 
German lands to a place of distinct importance, and to have 
given a turn to such instruction which it has ever since retained.^ 
The methods of instruction, too, worked out in arithmetic, geog- 
raphy, geometry, natural history, physics, and history were in 
many ways as revolutionary as those evolved by Pestalozzi later 
on in Switzerland. In his emphasis on scientific subject-matter 
Basedow surpassed Pestalozzi, but Pestalozzi possessed a clearer, 
intuitive insight into the nature and purpose of the educational 
process. The work of the two men furnishes an interesting basis 
for comparison (R. 271), and the work of each gave added import- 
ance to that of the other. 

From Dessau an interest in pedagogical ideas and experiments 
spread over Europe, and particularly over German lands. Other 
institutions, modeled after the Philanthropinum, were founded in 
many places, and some of Basedow's followers ^ did as important 
work along certain lines as did Basedow himself. His followers 
were numerous, and of all degrees of worth. They urged accept- 
ance of the new ideas of Rousseau as worked out and promulgated 
by Basedow; vigorously attacked the old schools, making con- 
verts here and there; and in a way helped to prepare northern 
German lands for the incoming, later, of the better-organized 
ideas of the German-Swiss reformer Pestalozzi, to whose work we 
next turn. 

^ "The pedagogical character of the i?ea/-school was established by Basedow and 
his followers. Originally the plan was to provide for the middle classes what would 
be called nowadays manual training schools, in which the scientific principles under- 
lying the various trades and business vocations should have a prominent place. 
These schools were to be one step removed from the trade schools for the lower 
classes. But under the influence of the Philanthropinists the i?ca^school was trans- 
formed into a modern humanistic school, and placed in competition with the human- 
istic Gymnasium." (Russell, J. E., German Higher Schools, pp. 65-66.) 

^ His two most important followers were Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818), 
who succeeded Basedow at Dessau and later founded a Philanthropinum at Ham- 
burg, and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (i 744-181 1), who founded a school at 
Schnepfenthal, in Saxe-Gotha. Both these men had for a time been teachers with 
Basedow at Dessau. Campe translated Locke's Thoughts and Rousseau's Emile 
into German, wrote a number of books for children (chief among which was the 
famous Robinson der J linger), and also prepared a number of treatises for teachers. 
Salzmann's school, opened in 1784 in the Thuringen forest, made much of garden- 
ing, agricultural work, animal study, home geography, nature study, gymnastics, 
and recreation, as well as book study. It was distinctively a small but high- 
grade experimental school, so successful that in 1884 it celebrated its one hundredth 
anniversary. A pupil in the school was Carl Ritter, the founder of modern geo- 
graphical study. 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 539 



III. THE WORK AND INFLUENCE OF PESTALOZZI 

The inspiration of Pestalozzi. Among those most deeply in- 
fluenced by Rousseau's Emile was a young German-Swiss by the 
name of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who was born (1746) and 
brought up in the ancient city of Zurich. Inspired by Rousseau's 
writings he spent the early part of his hfe in trying to render serv- 
ice to the poor, and the latter part in working out for himself a 
theory and a method of instruction based on the natural develop- 
ment of the child. To Pestalozzi, more than to any one else, we 
owe the foundations of the modern secular vernacular elementary 
school, and in consequence his work is of commanding importance 
in the history of the development of educational practice. 

Trying to educate his own child according to Rousseau's plan, 
he not only discovered its impracticability but also that the only 
way to improve on it was to study the children themselves. Ac- 
cordingly he opened a school and home on his farm at Neuhof , 
in 1774. Here he took in fifty abandoned children, to whom 
he taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, gave them moral 
discourses, and trained them in gardening, farming, and cheese- 
making. It was an attempt to regenerate beggars by means of 
education, which Pestalozzi firmly beHeved could be done. At 
the end of two years he had spent all the money he and his wife 
possessed, and the school closed in failure — a blessing in dis- 
guise — though with Pestalozzi's faith in the power of education 
unshaken. Of this experiment he wrote: "For years I have lived 
in the midst of fifty little beggars, sharing in my poverty my 
bread with them, living like a beggar myself in order to teach 
beggars to live like men." 

Turning next to writing, while continuing to farm, Pestalozzi 
now tried to express his faith in education in printed form. His 
Leonard and Gertrude (1781) was a wonderfully beautiful story of 
Swiss peasant life, and of the genius and sympathy and love of a 
woman amid degrading surroundings. From a wretched place 
the village of Bonnal, under Pestalozzi's pen, was transformed by 
the power of education.^ The book was a great success from the 

1 "The picture shown in Leonard and Gertrude is very crude. Everywhere is 
visible the rough hand of the painter, a strong, untiring hand, painting an eternal 
image, of which this in paper and print is the merest sketch. . . . Read it and see 
how puerile it is, how too obvious are its morahties. Read it a second time, and 
note how earnest it is, how exact and accurate are its peasant scenes. Read it yet 
again, and recognize in it the outpouring of a rare soul, working, pleading, ready to 
be despised, for fellow souls." (J. P. Monroe, The Educational Ideal, p. 182.) 



540 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

first, and for it Pestalozzi was made a "citizen" of the French 
Repubhc, along with Washington, Madison, Kosciusko, Wilber- 
force, and Tom Paine. He continued to farm and to think 
though nearly starving, until 1798, when the opportunity for 
which he was really fitted came. 

Pestalozzi's educational experiments. In 1798 '"The Helvetic 
Republic" was proclaimed, an event which divided Pestalozzi's 
life into two parts. Up to this time he had been interested wholly 
in the philanthropic aspect of education, believing that the pool 
could be regenerated through education and labor. From thii 
time on he interested himself in the teaching aspect of the prob- 
lem, in the working-out and formulation of a teaching method 
based on the natural development of the child, and in training 
others to teach. Much to the disgust of the authorities of the 
new Swiss Government, citizen Pestalozzi applied for service as 
a schoolteacher. The opportunity to render such service soon 
came. 

That autumn the French troops invaded Switzerland, and, in 
putting down the stubborn resistance of the three German can- 
tons, shot down a large number of the people. Orphans to the 
number of 169 were left in the little town of Stanz, and citizen 
Pestalozzi was given charge of them. For six months he was 
father, mother, teacher, and nurse. Then, worn out himself, the 
orphanage was changed into a hospital. A Kttle later he became 
a schoolmaster in Burgdorf ; was dismissed; became a teacher in 
another school; and finally, in 1800, opened a school himself in an 
old castle there. He now drew about him other teachers inter- 
ested in improving instruction, and in consequence could special- 
ize the work. He provided separate teachers for drawing and 
singing, geography and history, language and arithmetic, and 
gymnastics. The year following the school was enlarged into a 
teachers' training-school, the government extending him aid in re- 
turn for giving Swiss teachers one month of training as teachers in 
his school. Here he wrote and published How Gertrude teaches 
her Children, which explained his methods and forms his most im- 
portant pedagogical work (R. 267) ; a Guide for teaching Spelling 
and Reading; and a Book for Mothers, devoted to a description of 
"object teaching." In 1803, the castle being needed by the gov- 
ernment, Pestalozzi moved first to Munchenbuchsee, near Hof- 
<vyl, opening his Institute temporarily in an old convent there. 
For a few months, in 1804, he was associated with Emanuel von 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 541 




FRANCE 






• Cities 

•!• Monasteries 



Fig. 166. The Scene of Pestalozzi's Labors 



Fellenberg, at Hofwyl (p. 546), but in October, 1804, he moved 
to Yverdon, where he reestablished the Institute, and where the 
next twenty years of his Hfe were spent and his greatest success 
achieved. 

The contribution of Pestalozzi. The great contribution of 
Pestalozzi lay in that, following the lead of Rousseau, he rejected 
the religious aim and the teaching of mere words and facts, which 
had characterized all elementary education up to near the close of 
the eighteenth century, and tried instead to reduce the educa- 
tional process to a well-organized routine, based on the natural 
and orderly development of the instincts, capacities, and powers 
of the growing child. Taking Rousseau's idea of a return to na- 
ture, he tried to apply it to the education of children. This led to 
his rejection of what he called the "empty chattering of mere 
words " and "outward show " in the instruction in reading and the 
catechism, and the introduction in their place of real studies, 
based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning. "Sense 
impression" became his watchword.^ As he expressed it, he 

1 "When I now look back and ask myself: What have I specially done for the 
very being of education, I find I have fixed the highest supreme principle of instruc- 
tion in the recognition of sense impression as the absolute foundation of all knowledge. 
Apart from all special teaching I have sought to discover the nature of teaching itself, 
and the prototype, by which nature herself has determined the instruction of oui 
race." (Pestalozzi, How Gertrude teaches her Children, x, § i.) 



542 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

"tried to organize and psychologize the educational process" by 
harmonizing it with the natural development of the child (R. 267). 
To this end he carefully studied children, and developed his 
methods experimentally as a result of his observation. To this 
end, both at Burgdorf and Yverdon, all results of preceding teach- 
ers and writers on education were rejected, for fear that error might 
creep in. Read nothing, discover everything, and prove all things, 
came to be the working guides of himself and his teachers. 

The development of man he believed to be organic, and to pro- 
ceed according to law. It was the work of the teacher to discover 
these laws of development and to assist nature in securing "a 
natural, symmetrical, and harmonious development" of all the 
"faculties " of the child. Real education must develop the child 
as a whole — mentally, physically, morally — and called for the 
training of the head and the hand and the heart. The only proper 
means for developing the powers of the child was use, and hence 
education must guide and stimulate self-activity, be based on in- 
tuition and exercise, and the sense impressions must be organized 
and directed. Education, too, if it is to follow the organic devel- 
opment of the child, must observe the proper progress of child de- 
velopment and be graded, so that each step of the process shall 
grow out of the preceding and grow into the following stage. To 
accomplish these ends the training must be all-round and har- 
monious; much liberty must be allowed the child in learning; edu- 
cation must proceed largely by doing instead of by words, the 
method of learning must be largely analytical; real objects and 
ideas must precede symbols and words; and, finally, the organiza- 
tion and correlation of what is learned must be looked after by the 
teacher. 

Still more, Pestalozzi possessed a deep and abiding faith, new at 
the time, in the power of education as a means of regenerating 
society. He had begun his work by trying to "teach beggars to 
live like men," and his belief in the potency of education in work- 
ing this transformation, so touchingly expressed in his Leonard 
<ind Gertrude, never left him. He believed that each human being 
could be raised through the influence of education to the level of 
an intellectually free and morally independent life, and that every 
human being was entitled to the right to attain such freedom and 
independence. The way to this lay through the full use of his 
developing powers, under the guidance of a teacher, and not 
through a process of repeating words and learning by heart. Not 




Plate ii. Pestalozzi Monument at Yverdon 

A picture of this monument occupies a prominent place in ever>' 
schoolroom in Switzerland. 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 543 

only the intellectual qualities of perception, Judgment, and reason- 
ing need exercise, but the moral powers as well. To provide such 
exercise and direction was the work of the school. 

Pestalozzi also resented tJie brutal discipline which for ages had 
characterized all school instruction, believed it by its very nature 
immoral, and tried to substitute for this a strict but loving dis- 
cipline — a " thinkingJove^!!Jie calls it — and to make the school 
as nearly as possibleTike a gentle and refined home. To a Swiss 
father, who on visiting his school exclaimed, ''Why, this is not a 
school, but a family," Pestalozzi answered that such a statement 
was the greatest praise he could have given him. 

The consequences of these ideas. The educational conse- 
quences of these new ideas were very large. They in time gave 
aim and purpose to the elementary school of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, transforming it from an instrument of the Church for church 
ends, to an instrument of society to be used for its own regenera- 
tion and the advancement of the welfare of all.^ The introduc- 
tion of the study of natural objects in place of words, and much 
talking about what was seen and studied instead of parrot-like 
reproductions of the words of a book, revolutionized both the 
methods and the subject-matter of instruction in the developing 
elementary school. Observation and investigation tended to 
supersede mere memorizing; class discussion and thinking to su- 
persede the reciting of the words of the book; thinking about 
what was being done to supersede routine learning; and class in- 
struction to supersede the wasteful individual teaching which had 
for so long characterized all school work. It meant the reorgani- 
zation of the work of the vernacular school on a modern basis, 
with class organization and group instruction, and a modern- 
world purpose (R. 269). 

/The work of Pestalozzi also meant the introduction of new~ 
4ubject-matter for instruction, the organization of new teaching 
subjects for the elementary school, and the redirection of the el- 
ementary education of children. Observation led to the devel- 
opment of elementary-science study, and the study of home 
geography; talking about what was observed led to the study of 

1 "What he did was to emphasize the new purpose in education, but vaguely 
perceived, where held at all, by others; to make clear the new meaning of education 
which existed in rather a nebulous state in the public mind; to formulate an entirely 
new method, based on new principles, both of which were to receive a further devel- 
opment in subsequent times, and to pass under his name; and finally, to give an 
entirely new spirit to the schoolroom." (Monroe, Paul, Text Book in the History oj 
Education, p. 609.) 



544 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

language usage, as distinct from the older study of grammar; and 
counting and measuring led to the study of number, and hence to 
a new type of primary arithmetic. The Jading of the school also 
changed both in character and purpose. In other words, in place 
of an elementary education based on reading, a little writing and 
spelling, and the catechism, all of a memoriter type and with re- 
ligious ends in view, a new primary school, essentially secular in 
character, was created by the work of Pestalozzi. This new 
school was based on/the study of real objects, learning through 
sense impressions,^-^e individual expression of ideas, child activ- 
ity, and the development of the child's powers in an orderly way. 
--^n fact, "the development of the faculties" of the child became a 
by-word with Pestalozzi and his followers. 

Pestalozzi's deep abiding faith in the power of education to re- 
generate society was highly influential in Switzerland, throughout 
western Europe, and later in America in showing how to deal 
with orphans, vagrants, and those suffering from physical defects 
or in need of reformation, by providing for such a combination of 
intellectual and industrial training. 

The spread and influence of Pestalozzi's work. So famous did 
the work of Pestalozzi become that his schools at Burgdorf and 
Yverdon came to be "show places," even in a land filled with nat- 
ural wonders. Observers and students came from America (R. 
268) and from all over Europe to see and to teach in his school, 
and draw inspiration from seeing his work (R. 270) and talking 
with him.^ In particular the educators of Prussia were attracted 
by his work, and, earlier than other nations, saw the far-reaching 
significance of his discoveries. Herbart visited his school as early 
as 1799, when but a young man of twenty-three, and wrote a very 
sympathetic description of his new methods. Froebel spent the 
years 1808 to 1810 as a teacher at Yverdon, when he was a young 

1 In 1809 the German, Carl Ritter, a former pupil of Salzmann (see footnote 2, 
p. 538) and the creator of modern geographical study, visited Pestalozzi at Yverdon. 
Of this visit he writes: 

"I have seen more than the' paradise of Switzerland, I have seen Pestalozzi, I 
have learned to know his heart and his genius. Never have I felt so impressed with 
the sanctity of my vocation as when I was with this noble son of Switzerland. I 
cannot recall without emotion this society of strong men, struggling with the present, 
with the aim of clearing the way for a better future, men whose only joy and reward 
is the hope of raising the child to the dignity of man. 

" I left Yverdon resolved to fulfill my promise made to Pestalozzi to carry his 
method into geography. . . . Pestalozzi did not know as much geography as a child 
in our Primary Schools, but, none the less, have I learned that science from him, for 
it was in listening to him that I felt awaken within me the instinct of the natural 
methods; he showed me the way." (Guimps, Baron de, Pestalozzi, his Aim and 
Work, p. 167.) 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 545 

man of twenty-six to eight. ''It soon became e\ddent to me," 
wrote Froebel, " that 'Pestalozzi' was to be the watchword of my 
life." The philosopher Fichte, whose Addresses (1807-08) on the 
condition of the German people (page 568), after their hu- 
mihating defeat by Napoleon, did much to reveal to Prussia the 
possibilities of national regeneration by means of education, had 
taught in Zurich, knew Pestalozzi, and afterward exploited his 
work and his ideas in Berlin.^ As early as 1803 an envoy, sent by 
the Prussian King,' reported favorably on Pestalozzi's work, and 
in 1804 Pestalozzian methods were authorized for the primary 
schools of Prussia. In 1808 seventeen teachers were sent to 
Switzerland, at the expense of the Prussian Government, to spend 
three years in studying Pestalozzi's ideas and methods. On 
their return, these and others spread Pestalozzian ideas through- 
out Prussia. A pastor and teacher from Wiirtemberg, Karl 
August Zeller (i 774-1847), came to Burgdorf in 1803 to study. 
In 1806 he opened a training-school for teachers in Zurich, and 
there worked out a plan of studies based on the work of Pesta- 
lozzi. This was printed and attracted much attention. In 1808 
the King of Wiirtemberg listened to five lectures on Pestalozzian 
methods by Zeller, and invited him to a position as school inspec- 
tor in his State. Before he had done but a few months' work he 
was called to Prussia, to organize a normal school and begin the 
introduction of Pestalozzian ideas there. From Prussia the ideas 
and methods of Pestalozzi gradually spread to the other German 
States. 

Many Swiss teachers were trained by Pestalozzi, and these also 
helped to extend his work and ideas over Switzerland. Particu- 
larly in German Switzerland did his ideas take root and reorgan- 
ize education. As a result modem systems of education made an 
early start in these cantons. One of Pestalozzi's earliest and most 
faithful teachers, Hermann Kriisi, became principal of the Swiss 
normal school at Gais, and trained teachers there in Pestalozzian 

1 The young German student of geology and mineralogy, Karl George von Rau- 
mer (1783-1865), was in Paris, in 1808. While there he read Pestalozzi's How Ger- 
trude teaches her Children, and what Fichte had said of his work in his Addresses to 
the German Nation (see chapter xxii). These sent him to Yverdon to see for him- 
self. He remained two years, and returned to Germany as a teacher. In 1846 he 
published his four-volume Geschichte der Pddagogik, the first important history of 
education to be written. 

2 In 1814 King Frederick William III himself visited Pestalozzi, at Neufchatel. 
His queen, Louise, was deeply touched by reading the Emile, and frequently spent 
hours in the Prussian schools witnessing work conducted after the ideas of Pesta- 



546 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

methods. Zeller's pupils, too, did much to spread his influence 
among the Swiss. Pestalozzi's ideas were also carried to England, 
but in no such satisfactory manner as to the German States. 
Where German lands received both the method and the spirit, 
the English obtained largely the form. Later Pestalozzian ideas 
came to the United States, at first largely through EngHsh sources, 
and, after about i860, resulted in a thoroughgoing reorganization 
of American elementary education. 

After Pestalozzi's institution had become celebrated, and visi- 
tors and commissions from many countries had visited him and 
it, and after governments had vied with one another in intro- 
ducing Pestalozzian methods and reforms, the vogue of the Pesta- 
lozzian ideas became very extended. Many excellent private 
schools were founded on the Pestalozzian model, while on the 
other hand self-styled Pestalozzian reformers sprang up on all 
sides. All this imitation was both natural and helpful; the fool- 
ishness and charlatanism in time disappeared, leaving a real ad- 
vance in the educational conception. 

The manual-labor school of Fellenberg. Of the Swiss associ- 
ates and followers of Pestalozzi one of the most influential was 
Phillip Emanuel von Fellenberg (17 71-1844). The son of a 
Swiss official of high poUtical and social position, possessed of 
wealth, having traveled extensively, Fellenberg, having become con- 
vinced that correct early education was the only means whereby 
the State might be elevated and the lot of man made better, 
resolved (1805) to devote his life and his fortune to the working- 
out of his ideas. For a short time associated with Pestalozzi, he 
soon withdrew and estabhshed, on his own estate, an Institution 
which later (1829) came to comprise the following: 

1. A farm of about six hundred acres. 

2. Workshops for manufacturing clothing and tools. 

3. A printing and lithographing establishment. 

4. A literary institution for the education of the well-to-do. 

5. A lower or real school, which trained for handicrafts and middle- 
class occupations. 

6. An agricultural school for the education of the poor as farm 
laborers, and as teachers for the rural schools. 

By 1810 the Institution had begun to attract attention, and soon 
pupils and visitors came from distant lands to study in and to ex- 
amine the schools. The agricultural school in particular aroused 
interest. More than one hundred Reports (R. 272) were pub- 




Plate 12. Fellenberg's Institute at Hofwyl 

The first Agricultural and Mechanical CoUege. This school contained the 

germ-idea of all our agricultural education. 




NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 547 

lished, in Europe and America, on this very successful experi- 
ment in a combined intellectual and manual-labor type of educa- 
tion. Fellenberg died in 1844, and his family discontinued the 
school in 1848. 

Fellenberg's work was a continuation of the social-regeneration 
conception of education held by Pestalozzi, and contained the 
germ-idea of all our agricultural and 
industrial education. His plan was 
widely copied in Switzerland, Ger- 
many, England, and the United States. 
It was well suited to the United States 
because of the very democratic condi- 
tions then prevaiHng among an agri- 
cultural people possessed of but little 
wealth. The plan of combining farm- 
ing and schooling made for a time a 
strong appeal to Americans, and such 
schools were founded in many parts 

of the country. The idea at first ^'^- f/^yf-^,™"^^^ 
was to unite training in agriculture 

with schooling, but it was soon extended to the rapidly rising 
mechanical pursuits as well. The plan, however, was rather 
short-lived in the United States, due to the rise of manufacturing 
and the opening of rich and cheap farms to the westward, and 
lasted with us scarcely two decades. A generation later it reap- 
peared in the Central West in the form of a new demand for col- 
leges to teach agricultural and mechanical arts, but with the 
manual-labor idea omitted. This we shall refer to again, later on 
(chapter xxrx). 

IV. REDIRECTION OF THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 

Significance of this work. Though some form of parish school 
for the elements of religious instruction had existed in many 
places during the later Middle Ages, and foundations pro\dding 
for some type of elementary instruction had appeared here and 
there in almost all lands, the elementary vernacular school, as we 
have previously pointed out, was nevertheless clearly the out- 
come of the Protestant movement in the sixteenth century, and 
in its origin was essentially a child of the Church. A child of the 
Church, too, for more than two centuries the elementary vernacu- 
lar school remained. During these two centuries the elementary 



548 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

school made slow but rather unsatisfactory progress, due largely 
to there being no other motive for its maintenance or expansion 
than the original religious purpose. Only in the New England 
Colonies in North America, in some of the provinces of the Neth- 
erlands, and in a few of the German States had any real progress 
been made in evolving any different type of school out of this 
early religious creation, and even in these places the change was 
in form of control rather than in subject-matter or purpose. The 
school remained religious in purpose, even though its control was 
beginning to pass from the Church to the State. 

Now, within half a century, beginning with the work of Rous- 
seau (1762), and by means of the labors of the political philoso- 
phers of France, the Revolutionary leaders in the American Colo- 
nies, the legislative Assemblies and Conventions in France, and 
the experimental work of Basedow and his followers in German 
lands and of Pestalozzi and his disciples in Switzerland, the whole 
purpose and nature of the elementary vernacular school was 
changed. The American and French poHtical revolutions and the 
more peaceful changes in England had ushered in new concep- 
tions as to the nature and purpose and duties of government. As 
a consequence of these new ideas, education had come to be re- 
garded in a new light, and to assume a new importance in the 
ey£s of statesmen. In place of schools to serve religious and sec- 
tarian ends, and maintained as an adjunct of the parishes or of a 
State Church, the elementary vernacular school now came to be 
conceived of as an instrument of the State, the chief purpose of 
which was to seive state ends. Some time would, of course, be 
required to develop the state support necessary to effect the com- 
plete transformation in control, and the forces of reaction would 
naturally delay the process as much as possible, but the theory of 
state purpose had at last been so effectively proclaimed, and the 
forces of a modern world were pushing the idea so steadily for- 
ward, that it was only a question of time until the change would 
be effected. 

A new impetus for change in control. Basedow and Pestalozzi, 
too^ad^ven the movement for a transfer of controFa new ini- 
petus by working out new methods in instruction and in organiz- 
ing new^ubject-matter for the school, and methods and subject- 
matter which harmonized with the spirit and principles of the new 
democracy that had been proclaimed. Pestalozzi in particular 
had sousrht. guided by a clearer insight into the educational prob- 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 549 

lem than Basedow possessed (R. 271), to create a school in which 
children might, under the wise guidance of the teacher, develop 
and strengthen their own "faculties" and thus evolve into reason- 
ing, self-directing human beings, fitted for usefulness and service 
in a modem world. To make intelligent and reasoning individu- 
als of all citizens, to develop moral and civic character, to train 
for life in organized society, and to serve as an instrument by 
means of which an ignorant, drunken, immoral, and shiftless 
working-class and peasantry might be elevated into men and 
women of character, intelligence, and directive power, was in 
Pestalozzi's conception the_underlying meaning of the school. 
After Pestalozzi, the earher conception as to the religious purpose 
of the elementary vernacular schools, by means of which children 
were to be trained almost exclusively "in the principles of our 
holy religion" and to become "loyal church members," and to 
"fit them for that station in life in which it hath pleased their 
Heavenly Father to place them," was doomed. In its stead 
there was certain to arise a newer conception of the school as an 
(instrument of that form of organized society known as the State, 
'and maintained by the State to train its future citizens for intelli- 
gent participation in the duties and obligations of citizenship, and 
for social, moral, and economic efiiciency. 

The way now becoming clear. After two hundred and fifty 
years of confusion and political failure, the way was now at last 
becoming clear for the creation of national instead of church sys- 
tems of elementary education, and for the firm estabUshment of 
the elementary vernacular school as an important obligation to 
its future citizens of every progressive modern State and the com- 
mon birthright of all. This became distinctively the work of the 
nineteenth century. It also became the work of the nineteenth 
century to gather up the old secondary-school and university 
foundations, accumulated through the ages, and remould them to 
meet modern needs, fuse them into the national school systems 
created, and connect them in some manner with the people's 
schools. To see how this was done we next turn to the begin- 
nings of the organization of national school systems in the German 
States, France, Italy, England, and the United States. These 
may be taken as types. As Prussia was the first modern State to 
grasp the significance of national education, and to organize state 
schools, we shall begin our study by first tracing the steps by 
which this transformation was effected there. 




550 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Compare the statement of the valuable elements in the theories of Rous- 
seau (p. 530) with the main ideas of Basedow (p. 535); Ratke (p. 607); 
Comenius (p. 409). 

2. Do we accept all the fourteen points of Rousseau's theory to-day? 

3. Might a Rousseau have done work of similar importance in Russia, early 
in the twentieth century? Why? 

4. Explain the educational significance of "self-activity," "sense impres- 
sions," and "harmonious development." 

5. What were the strong points in the experimental work of Basedow? 

6. Explain the great enthusiasm which his rather visionary statements and 
plans awakened. 

7. Show the importance of such work as that of Basedow in preparing the 
way for better-organized reform work. 

8. How far was Pestalozzi right as to the power of education to give men 
intellectual and moral freedom? 

9. What do you understand Pestalozzi to have meant by " the development 
of the faculties"? 

State the importance of the work of Pestalozzi from the point of view 
of showing the world how to deal with orphans and defectives. 
Show how the germs of agricultural and technical education lay in the 
work of Fellenberg. 

Explain the greater popularit}^ of the Emile in German lands. 
State the change in subject-matter and aims from the vernacular church 
school to the school as thought out by Pestalozzi. 

14. Show that it was a fortunate conjunction that brought the work of Pesta- 
lozzi alongside of that of the political reformers of France. 

15. What differences might there have been had Comenius lived and done 
his work in the time of Pestalozzi? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections, illustrative 
of the contents of this chapter, are reproduced: 

264. Rousseau: Illustrative Selections from the Emile. 

265. Basedow: Instruction in the Philanthropinum. 

266. Basedow: A Page from the Elementarwerk. 

267. Pestalozzi: Explanation of his Work. 

268. Griscom: A Visit to Pestalozzi at Yverdon. 

269. Woodbridge: An Estimate of Pestalozzi's Work. 

270. Dr. Mayo: On Pestalozzi. 

271. Woodbridge: Work of Pestalozzi and Basedow compared. 

272. Griscom: Hofwyl as seen by an American. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Show the fallacy of Rousseau's reasoning (264 d) as to society being a 
denominator which prevents man from realizing himself. 

2. What are the elements of truth and falsity in Rousseau's idling- to-the- 
twelfth-year (264 d) idea? 

3. Would such a training up to twelve (264 e) be possible, or desirable? 

4. What tjqje of education is presupposed in 264 f? 

5. Show the similarity in the conceptions of the Orbis Pictus (221) and tho 
Elementarwerk (266). 



NEW THEORY AND SUBJECT-MATTER 551 

6. What types of schools and conceptions of education were combined in 
the Philanthropinum (265)? 

7. Just what did Pestalozzi attempt (267) to accomphsh? 

8. Compare the accounts as to purpose and instruction given by Pestalozzi 
(267) and Griscom (268). 

9. What do the tributes of Woodbridge (269) and Mayo (270) reveal as 
to the character of Pestalozzi and his influence? 

10. Analyze the courses of instruction (272) at Hofwyl. 

11. State the points of similarity and difference between the work of Basedow 
/ and Pestalozzi (271), and the points of superiority in the work of Pesta- 
lozzi. 

SELECTED REFERENCES 

*Anderson, L. F. "The Manual-Labor-School Movement"; in Educa- 
tional Review, vol. 46, pp. 369-88. (November, 1913.) 
Barnard, Henry. Pestalozzi and his Educational System. 
*Compayre, G. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 
; *Compayre, G. Pestalozzi and Elementary Education. 
*Guimps, Roger de. Pestalozzi: his Aim and Work. 
*Kriisi, Hermann, Jr. Life and Work of Pestalozzi. 
*Parker S. C. History of Modern Education, chaps. 8, 9, 13-16. 
*Pestalozzi, J. H. Leonard and Gertrude. 
Pestalozzi, J. H. How Gertrude teaches her Children. 
Pinloche, A. Pestalozzi and the Foundations of the Modern Elementary 
School. 



CHAPTER XXII 
NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 

I. THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL ORGANIZATION 

Early German progress in school organization. The first mod- 
em nation to take over the school from the Church, and to make 
of it an instrument for promoting the interests of the State was 
Prussia, and the example of Prussia was soon followed by the 
other German States, The reasons for this early action by the 
German States will be clear if we remember the marked progress 
made in establishing state control of the churches (p. 318) which 
followed the Protestant Revolts in German lands. Figure 96, 
page 319, reexamined now, will make the reason for the earlier 
evolution of state education in Germany plain. Wiirtemberg, 
as early as 1559, had organized the first German state=church 
school system, and had made attendance at the rehgious instruc- 
tion compulsory on the parents of all children. The example 
of Wiirtemberg was followed by Brunswick (1569), Saxony 
(1580), Weimar (1619), and Gotha (1642). In Weimar and 
Gotha the compulsory-attendance idea had even been adopted 
for elementary-school instruction to all children up to the age 
of twelve. 

By the middle of the seventeenth century most of the German 
States, even including Cathohc Bavaria, had followed the example 
of Wiirtemberg, and had created a state-church school system 
which involved at least elementary and secondary schools and the 
beginnings of compulsory school attendance. Notwithstanding 
the ravages of the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), the state-church 
schools of German lands contained, more definitely than had been 
worked out elsewhere, the germs of a separate state school organi- 
zation. Only in the American Colonies (p. 364) had an equal de- 
velopment in state-church organization and control been made. 
As state-church schools, with the religious purpose dominant, the 
German schools remained until near the middle of the eighteenth 
century. Then a new movement for state control began, and 
within fifty years thereafter they had been transformed into in- 
stitutions of the State, with the state purpose their most essential 
characteristic. How this transformation was effected in Prussia, 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 553 

the leader among the German States, and the forces which 
brought about the transformation, it will be the purpose of this 
chapter to relate. 

The new University of Halle. The turning-point in the history 
of German educational progress was the founding of the Univer- 
sity of Halle, in 1694. This institution, due to its entirely new 
methods of work, has usually been designated as the first modern 
university. A few forward-looking men, men who had been ex- 
pelled from Leipzig because of their critical attitude and modern 
ways of thinking, were made professors here. Its creation was 
due to the sympathy for these men felt by the Elector Friedrich 
III of Brandenburg, later the first King of Prussia. The King 
clearly intended that the new institution should be representative 
of modern tendencies in education. To this end he installed as 
professors men who could and would reform the instruction in 
theology, law, medicine, and philosophy. 

In consequence Aristotle was displaced for the new scientific 
philosophy of Descartes and Bacon, and Latin in the classrooms 
for the German speech. The sincere pietistic faith of Francke (p. 
418) was substituted for the Lutheran dogmatism which had sup- 
planted the earUer CathoHc. The instruction in law was reformed 
to accord with the modern needs and theory of the State. Medi- 
cal instruction, based on observation, experimentation, and de- 
duction, superseded instruction based on the reading of Hip- 
pocrates and Galen. The new sciences, especially mathematics 
and physics, found a congenial home in the philosophical or arts 
faculty. Free scientific investigation and research, without in- 
terference from the theological faculty, were soon established as 
features of the institution, and in place of the fixed scientific 
knowledge taught for so long from the texts of Aristotle (Rs. 113- 
15) and other ancients, a new and changing science, that must 
prove its laws and axioms, and which might at any time be 
changed by the investigation of any teacher or student, here now 
found a home. Under the leadership of Christian Wolff, who 
was Professor of Philosophy from 1707 to 1723, when he was ban- 
ished by a new King at the instigation of the Pietists for his too 
great liberaHsm in religion, and again from 1740 to 1754, after his 
recall by Frederick the Great, ^ philosophy was "made to speak 
German" and the AristoteHan philosophy was permanently dis- 

^ One of the first acts of the reign of Frederick the Great was to recall Wolff from 
banishment. In doing so he said: "A man that seeks truth, and loves it, must be 
leckoned precious in any human society." 



554 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

placed. ''Nothing without sufficient cause" was the ruling prin- 
ciple of Wolff's teaching. 

Changes wrought in old established procedure. The introduc- 
tion of the new scientific and mathematical and philosophical 
studies soon changed the arts or philosophy faculty from a pre- 
paratory faculty for the faculties of law, medicine, and theology, 
as it had been for centuries, to the equal of these three profes- 
sional faculties in importance, while the elementary instruction 
in Latin and Greek was now relegated to the Gymnasia below. 
These were now in turn changed into preparatory schools for all 
four faculties of the university. The university instruction in the 
ancient languages was now placed on a much higher plane, and a 
new humanistic renaissance took place (p. 462) which deeply in- 
fluenced both university and gymnasial training. New standards 
of taste and judgment were drawn from the ancient literatures 
and applied to modern life, and students were trained to read and 
enjoy the ancient classics. This reawakening of the best spirit of 
the Italian Renaissance marked the first outburst of a national 
feeling of a people as yet possessed of no national literature of im- 
portance, but unwilling longer to depend on foreign (French) in- 
fluences for the cultural elements in their intellectual life. 

It was at Halle, too, that Gundling, in 171 1, discussed "the 
office of a university " and laid down the modern university theory 
of Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit — that is, freedom from outside 
interference in teaching and studying, both teachers and students 
to be free to follow the truth wherever the truth might lead, and 
without reference to what preconceived theories might be upset 
thereby. This was a revolution in university procedure, ^ and the 
importance of the establishment of this new conception of uni- 
versity work can scarcely be overestimated. It was a contribu- 
tion to intellectual progress of large future value. It meant the 
end of the old-type university, ruled by a narrow theological dog- 
matism and maintained to give support to a particular religious 
faith, and the ultimate transformation of the old university foun- 

1 "It was a bold declaration, but one which exactly described the great change 
which had taken place. The older university instruction was everywhere based 
upon the assumption that the truth had already been given, that instruction had 
to do with its transmission only, and that it was the duty of the controUing authori- 
ties to see to it that no false doctrines were taught. The new university instruction 
began with the assumption that the truth must be discovered, and that it was the 
duty of instruction to qualify and guide the student in this task. By assuming 
this attitude the university was the first to accept the consequences of the condi- 
tions which the Reformation had created." (Paiilsen, Fr., The German Universities^ 
p. 46.) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 555 

dations into institutions actuated by the methods and purposes of 
a modern world. 

In 1734 another new university was founded at Gottingen, and 
in this Johann Matthias Gesner (1691-1761) raised the new hu- 
manistic learning to the place of first importance. This new uni 
versity became a nursery for the new hterary humanism, ably sup- 
plementing the work done at Halle. From these two universities 
teachers of a new type went out, filled with the spirit of "The En- 
lightenment," as this eighteenth-century German renaissance 
was called, and they in time regenerated all the German universi- 
ties. Still more, they regenerated the secondary schools of Ger- 
man lands as well, and gave Greek Hterature and life that place of 
first importance in their instruction which was retained until the 
latter part of the nineteenth century. Gesner at Gottingen, and 
later Ernesti at Leipzig, did much to formulate the new pedagogi- 
cal purpose ^ of instruction in the ancient languages and litera- 
tures for the higher schools of German lands. 

The earliest school laws for Prussia. In 1 7 13 there came to the 
kingship of Prussia an organizing genius in the person of Frederic 
WiUiam I (1713-40). Under his direction Prussia was given, for 
the first time, a centralized and uniform financial administration, 
and the beginnings of state school organization were made. He 
freed the State from debt, provided it with a good income, devel- 
oped a strong army, and began a vigorous colonization and com- 
mercial poHcy. Though he cared nothing and did nothing for the 
universities, the religious reform movement of Francke, as well as 
his educational undertakings (p. 419), found in the new King a 
warm supporter. Largely in consequence of this the King be- 
came deeply interested in attempts to improve and advance the 
education of the masses of his people. 

The first year of his reign he issued a Regulatory Code for the 
Reformed Evangelical and Latin schools of Prussia, and in 1717 
he issued the so-called "Advisory Order," relating to the people's 
schools. In this latter parents were urged, under penalty of 
"vigorous punishment," to send their children to school to learn 

1 "He who reads the works of the ancients will enjoy the acquaintance of the 
greatest men and the noblest souls who ever lived, and will get in this way, as it 
happens in all refined conversation, beautiful thoughts and expressive words. 

"We thus receive, in early childhood, doctrines and philosophy and wisdomof 
life from the wisest and best educated men of all ages; we thus learn to recognize 
and understand clearness, dignity, charm, ingenuity, deUcacy, and elegance in 
language and action, and gradually accustom ourselves to them." (Gesner, Johann 
Matthias.) 



556 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



religion, reading, writing, to calculate, and "all that could serve 
to promote their happiness and welfare." The tuition fees of 
poor children he ordered paid out of the community poor-box (R. 
^273). The following year he directed the authorities of Lithuania 
to reHeve the existing ignorance there, and sent commissioners to 
provide the villages with schoolmasters. From time to time he 




Fig. 168. The School of a Handworker 

Conducted in his home. A gentleman visiting the school. After a drawing in the 
German School Museum in Berhn. 



renewed his directions. To insure a better class of teachers for 
the towns and rural schools, he, in 1722, directed that no one be 
admitted to the office of sacristan-schoolmaster ^ except tailors, 
weavers, smiths, wheelwrights, and carpenters, and in 1738 he 
further restricted the position of teacher in the town and rural 
schools to tailors. 

Becoming especially Interested in providing schools for the pre- 
viously neglected province of East Prussia, he gave the sum of 

^ The sacristan or custodian cf the church was frequently also the teacher of th» 
elementary school, the two offices being combined in one person. Out of this com' 
bination the elementary teacher was later evolved. (See p. 446.) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 557 

fifty thousand thalers as an endowment fund, the interest to be 
used in assisting communities to build schoolhouses and maintain 
schools, and he also set aside large tracts of land for school uses. 
Within a few years over a thousand elementary schools had been 
established, and some eighteen hundred new schools in Prussia 
owed their origin to the interest of this King. He also took a 
similar interest in the establishment of schools in Pomerania 
(R. 273), a part of which had but recently been wrested from 
Sweden. 

In 1737 the King issued his celebrated Principia Regulative, 
which henceforth became the fundamental School Law for the 
province of East Prussia. This prescribed conditions for the 
building of schoolhouses, the support of the schoolmaster, tuition 
fees, and government aid. The following digest of the section of 
the Principia relating to these matters gives a good idea as to the 
nature of the school regulations the King sought to enforce: 

1. The parishes forming school societies were obliged to build school- 
houses and to keep them in repair. 

2. The State was to furnish the necessary timber and firewood. 

3. The expenses for doors, windows, and stoves to be obtained from 
collections. 

4. Every church to pay four thalers a year toward the support of the 
schoolmaster. 

5. Tuition fees for each child, from four to twelve years of age, to be 
four groschen per year. 

6. Government to pay the fee when a peasant sends more than one 
child to school. 

7. The peasants to furnish the teacher with certain provisions. 

8. The teacher to have the right of free pasture for his small stock 
and some fees from every child confirmed. 

9. Government to give the teacher one acre of land, which villagers 
were to till for him. 

In 1738 the King further regulated the private schools and 
teachers in and about Berhn, in particular dealing with their 
qualifications and fees. The King showed, for the time, an inter- 
est in and solicitude for the education of his people heretofore al- 
most unknown. That his decrees were in advance of the possibili- 
ties of the people in the matter of school support is not to be won- 
dered at. Still, they rendered useful service in preparing the way 
for further organizing work by his successors, and in particular in 
accustoming the people to the ideas of state oversight and local 
school support. Under his successor and son, Frederick the 
Great, the preparatory work of the father bore important fruit- 



558 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The organizing work of Frederick the Great. In 1740 Freder- 
ick II, surnamed the Great, succeeded his father, and in turn 
guided the destinies of Prussia for forty-six years. His benevo- 
lently despotic rule has been described on a preceding page (p. 
474). Here we will consider only his work for education. In 
1740, 1 741, and again in 1743 he issued "regulations concerning 
the support of schools in the villages of Prussia," in which he di- 
rected that new schools should be established, teachers provided 
for them, and that "the existing school regulations and the ar- 
rangements made in pursuance thereto should be permanent, and 
^Jiat no change should be made under any pretext whatever." 

In 1750 he effected a centralization of all the provincial church 
i;onsistories, except that of Catholic Silesia, under the Berlin Con- 
sistory. This was a centralizing measure of large future impor- 
tance, as it centralized the administration of the schools, as well as 
that of the churches, and transformed the Berlin Consistory into 
an important administrative agent of the central government. 
To this new centralized administrative organization the King is- 
sued instructions to pay special attention to schools, in order that 
they might be furnished with able schoolmasters and the young be 
well educated. One of the results of this centralization was the 
gradual evolution of the modern German Gymnasien, with uni- 
form standards and improved instruction, out of the old and 
weakened Latin schools of various types within the kingdom. 

From 1756 to 1763 Frederick was engaged in a struggle for 
existence, known as the Seven Years' War, but as soon as peace 
was at hand the King issued new regulations "concerning the 
maintenance of schools," and began employing competent school- 
masters for his royal estates. In April, 1763, he issued instruc- 
tions to have a series of general school regulations prepared for all 
Prussia. These were drawn up by Julius Hecker, a former pupil 
and teacher in Francke's Institution (p. 418) and now a pastor in 
BerHn and counselor for the Berlin Consistory. After approval 
by the King, these were issued, September 23, 1763, under the 
title of General Land-Schule Reglement (general school regulations 
for the rural and village schools) of all Prussia (R. 274). These 
new regulations constituted the first general School Code for the 
whole kingdom, and mark the real foundation of the Prussian 
elementary-school system. Two years later (1765) a similar but 
stronger set of regulations or Code was drawn up and promul- 
gated for the government of the CathoUc elementary schools in 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 559 




Eaat from 16* Greenwloll 18° 



Fig. 169. The Kingdom of Prussia, 1740-86 

the province of Silesia (R. 275). This was a new province which 
Frederick had wrested by force a few years previously (1748) 
from Maria Theresa of Austria, and the addition of a large number 
of Catholics to Prussia caused Frederick to issue specific regula- 
tions for schools among them. 

These two School Codes did not so much bring already existing 
schools into a state system, but rather set up standards and obli- 
gations for an elementary-school system in part to be created in 
the future. The schools were still left under the supervision and 
direction of the Church, but the State now undertook to tell the 
Church what it must do. To enforce the obligation the State 
Inspectors of Prussia were directed to make an annual inspection 
(R. 274, § 26) of all schools, and to forward a report on their in- 
spection to the Berlin Consistory, and for CathoHc Silesia the 
following significant injunction was placed in the Code: 

§ 51. In order to render as permanent as possible this reform of 
schools, which lies near our heart, we cannot be satisfied with commit- 
ting the care of the schools to the clergy alone. We find it necessary 
that our bureau of War and Domain, the bureau of the Episcopal 
Vicariate, and the dioceses in our Silesian and Glatz districts, as well as 
our special school inspectors, give all due attention to this subject, so 
important to the State. 

The Prussian School Codes of 1763 and 1765. The regulations 
of 1763 were issued, so the introduction reads (R. 274), because 



56o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

"the instruction of youth" in the country had "come to be 
greatly neglected" and "the young people were growing up in 
stupidity and ignorance." The King, therefore, issued the new 
regulations "to the end that ignorance, so injurious and unbe- 
coming to Christianity, may be prevented and lessened, and the 
coming time may train and educate in the schools more enlight- 
ened and virtuous subjects." 

To this end the King ordered compulsory education for the 
children of all subjects from the ages of five to thirteen or four- 
teen, all apprentices to be taught, and leaving certificates to be 
issued on completion of the course (R. 274, §§ 1-4). The school 
hours were fixed, Sunday and summer instruction regulated, tui- 
tion fees standardized, and the fees of the children of the poor 
were ordered paid (R. 274, §§ 5-8). A school census, and fines on 
parents not sending their children to school were provided for (R. 
274, §§ lo-ii). The requirements for a teacher, his habits, his 
qualifications and examination, the license to teach, and the ex- 
tent to which he might ply his trade or business, were all laid 
down in some detail (R. 274 §§ 12-17). The organization, in- 
struction, textbooks, order of exercises, and discipline for all 
schools were prescribed at some length (R. 274, §§ 19-21). The 
Code closed with a series of regulations covering the relations of 
the schoolmaster and clergyman, and the supervision of the in- 
struction by the clergyman and clerical superintendents (R. 274, 
§§ 25-26). Incapable teachers were ordered suspended or de- 
posed. As a final injunction relative to school attendance the 
Code closed with the following sentence: 

In general we here confirm and renew all wholesome laws, published 
in former times, especially, that no clergyman shall admit to confirma- 
tion and the sacrament, any children not of his parish, nor those unable 
to read, or who are ignorant of the fundamental principles of evangeli- 
cal religion. 

The Code of 1765 for the Catholic schools of Silesia followed 
much the same line as the Code of 1763, though in it the King 
placed special emphasis on the training of schoolmasters, a sub- 
ject in which he had become much interested (R. 275 a) ; the regu- 
lation of the conditions under which teachers lived and worked 
(R. 275 b); and the supervision of instruction by the clergyman 
of the parish (R. 275 e). These directions throw much light on 
the conditions surrounding teaching near the middle of the eight- 
eenth century. The nature of instruction in the Catholic schools, 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 561 

and the compulsion to attend, were also definitely stated (R. 
275 c-d). 

These new Codes met with resistance everywhere. The money 
for the execution of such a comprehensive project was not as yet 
generally available; parents and churches objected to taxation 
and to the loss of their children from work ; the wealthy landlords 
objected to the financial burden; the standards for teachers later 
on (1779) had to be lowered, and veterans from Frederick's wars 
installed; and the examinations of teachers had to be made easy ^ 
to secure teachers at all for the schools. While there continued 
for some decades to be a vast difference between the actual condi- 
tions in the schools and the requirements of these Codes, and while 
the real establishment of a state school system awaited the first 
decade of the nineteenth century for its accomplishment, much 
valuable progress in organization nevertheless was made. In 
principle, at least, Frederick the Great, by the Codes of 1763 and 
1765, effected for elementary education a transition from the 
church school of the Protestant Reformation, and for Catholic 
Silesia from the parish school of the Church, to the state school of 
the nineteenth century. It remained only for his successors to 
realize in practice what he had made substantial beginnings of in 
law. Nowhere else in Europe that early had such progress in 
educational organization been made. 

The Prussian example followed in other German States. The \ 
example of Prussia was in time followed by the other larger Ger- 
man States. Wiirtemberg issued a new School Code in 1792, 
which remained the ruling law for the church schools throughout 
the eighteenth century. The Saxon King, Augustus the Just, in- 
spired by the example of Frederick, issued a mandate, in 1766, 
reminding parents as to their duty to send children to school, 
and in 1773 issued a new Regulation, filled with "generous 
enthusiasm for the cause." A teachers' training-school was 
founded at Dresden, in 1788, and four others before the close of 
the century. In 1805 a comprehensive Code was issued. This 
required that every child must be able to read, write, count, and 
know the truths of religion to receive the sacrament; clergymen 
were ordered to supervise the schools; school attendance was re- 

1 "When the schoolmaster had to pass an examination before the clergyman of 
the place by order of the inspector, the local authorities, owing to the lamentable 
life of a schoolmaster, were glad to find persons at all who were willing to accept an 
engagement for such a position. In consequence an otherwise intolerable indulgence 
in examining and employing teachers took place, especially in districts where large 
landholders had patriarchal sway." (Schmid, K. A., Encydopadie, vol. vi, p. 287.) 



562 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

quired from six to fourteen; the pay of teachers and the govern- 
ment appropriations for schools were increased; and a series of 
fines were imposed for violations of the Code. Bavaria issued 
new school Codes in 1770 and 1778, and additional schoolhouses 
were built and new textbooks written. After the suppression of 
the Jesuits (1773) a new progressive spirit animated the Cathohc 
States, and Austria in particular, under the leadership of Maria 
Theresa and Joseph II (p. 475), made marked progress in school 
organization and educational reform. 

In 1770 Maria Theresa appointed a School Commission to have 
charge of education in Lower Austria; in 1771 established the 
first Austrian normal school in Vienna; and in 1774 promulgated 
a General School Code (R. 276), drawn up by the Abbot Felbiger, 
who had been most prominent in school organization in Silesia. 
This Code provided for School Commissions in all provinces ; ^ 
ordered the estabhshment of an elementary school in all villages 
and parishes, a ** principal" or higher elementary school in the 
principal city of every canton, and a normal school in every prov- 
ince; laid down the course of study for each; and gave details as to 
teachers, instruction, compulsory attendance, support, and in- 
spection similar to Frederick's Silesian Code (R. 275). Continua- 
tion instruction up to twenty years of age also was ordered. That 
such demands were much in advance of what was possible is evi- 
dent, and it is not surprising that, in the reaction under Francis I, 
following the outburst of the French Revolution, we find a de- 
cree (1805) that the elementary school shall be curtailed to "ab- 
solutely necessary limits," and that 

the common people shall get in elementary school only such ideas as 
will not trouble them in their work, and which will not make them dis- 
contented with their condition; their intelligence shall be directed 
toward the fulfillment of their moral duties, and prudent and diligent 
fulfillment of their domestic and communal obligations. 

' The beginnings of teacher-training. The beginning of teacher- 
training in German lands was the Seminarium PrcBceptorum of 
Francke, established at Halle (p. 419), in 1697. In 1738 Johann 
Julius Hecker (1707-68), one of Francke's former students and 
teachers, and the author of the Prussian Code of 1763, estabHshed 
the first regular seminary for teachers in Prussia, to train intend- 

1 Austria at that time included not only the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 19 14, 
but extended further into the German Empire and Italy, and included Belgium and 
Luxemburg as well. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 563 

ing theological students for the temporary or parallel occupation 
of teaching in the Latin schools. In 1747 he established a private 
Lehrerseminar in Berlin, in connection with his celebrated Real- 
schule (p. 420), and there demonstrated the possibilities of teacher- 
training. Frederick the Great was so pleased with the result 
that, in 1753, he gave the school a subsidy and changed it into 
a royal institution, and on every fitting occasion recommended 
school authorities to it for teachers. Similar institutions were 
opened in Hanover, in 1751 ; Wolfenbiittel, in 1753; in the county 
of Glatz in Silesia, in 1764 (R. 275) ; in Breslau, in 1765 and 1767; 
and in Carlsruhe, in 1768. In the Silesian Code of 1765 Frederick 
specified (R. 275 a, § 2) six institutions which he had designated 
as teacher-training schools. 
" These early Prussian institutions laid the foundations upon 
which the normal-school system of the nineteenth century has 
been built. In Prussia first, but soon thereafter in other German 
States (Austria, at Vienna, 1771; Saxe-Weimar, at Eisenach, in 
1783; and Saxony, at Dresden, 1788) the Teachers' Seminary was 
erected into an important institution of the State, and the idea 
has since been copied by almost all modern nations. This early 
development in Prussia was influential in both France and the 
United States, as we shall point out further on. 

Despite these many important educational efforts, though, the 
type and the work of teachers remained low throughout the whole 
of the eighteenth century. In the rural and village schools the 
teachers continued to be deficient in number and lacking in prepa- 
ration. Often the pastors had first to give to invalids, cripples, 
shoemakers, tailors, watchmen, and herdsmen the rudimentary 
knowledge they in turn imparted to the children. In the towns 
of fair size the conditions were not much better than in the vil- 
lages. The elementary school of the middle-sized towns generally 
had but one class, common for boys and girls, and the magis- 
trates did little to improve the condition of the schools or the 
teachers. In the larger cities, and even in Berlin, the number of 
elementary schools was insufficient, the schools were crowded, 
and many children had no opportunity to attend schools.^ In 
Leipzig there was no pubHc school until 1792, in which year the 
city free school was established. Even Sunday schools, supported 
by subscription, had been resorted to by Berlin, after 1798, to 
provide journeymen and apprentices with some of the rudiments 

^ Bassewitz, M. Fr. von, Die Kurniark Brandenhurg, p. 342. (Leipzig, 1847. ■> 



5^4 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 1 70. A German late Eighteenth-Century School 
(After a picture in the German School Museum in Berlin) 



of an education. The creation of a state school system out of the 
insufhcient and inefi&cient religious schools proved a task of large 
dimensions, in Prussia as in other lands. Even as late as 1819 
Dinter found discouraging conditions (R. 27g) among the teachers 
of East Prussia. 

Further late eighteenth-century progress. Frederick the 
Great died in 1786. In the reign of his successors his work bore 
fruit in a complete transfer of all schools from church to state con- 
trol, and in the organization of the strongest system of state 
schools the world had ever known. The year following the death 
of Frederick the Great (1787), and largely as an outgrowth of the 
preceding centralizing work with reference to elementary educa- 
tion, the Superior School {OherschulcoUegium) Board was estab- 
lished to exercise a similar centralized control over the older sec- 
ondary and higher schools of Prussia. Secondary and higher edu- 
cation were now severed from church control, in principle at least, 
as elementary education had been by the "Regulations" of 1763 
and 1765. The year following (1788) "Leaving Examinations" 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 565 

(Maturitdtspriifung) were instituted to determine the completion 
of the gymnasial course. These, for a time, were largely ineffec- 
tive, due to clerical opposition, but the centralizing work of this 
Superior School Board for the supervision of higher education, 
and the state examinations for testing the instruction of the sec- 
ondary schools, were from the first important contributing influ- 
ences. 

In 1794 came the culmination of all the preceding work in the 
pubhcation of the General Civil Code (Allgemeine Landrecht) for 
the State, in which, in the section relating to schools, the following 
important declaration was made: 

Schools and universities are state institutions, charged with the 
instruction of youth in useful information and scientific knowledge. 
Such institutions may be founded only with the knowledge and con- 
sent of the State. All public schools and educational institutions are 
under the supervision of the State, and are at all times subject to its 
examination and inspection. 

The secular authority and the clergy were still to share jointly in 
the control of the schools, but both according to rules laid down 
by the State. In all cases of conflict or dispute, the secular 
authority was to decide. This important document forms the 
Magna Charta for secular education in Prussia. 

During the decade which followed the promulgation of this 
declaration of state control but little additional progress of im- 
portance was accomplished, though the Minister of Justice, to 
whom (1798) the administration of Lutheran church and school 
affairs had been given, maintained a correspondence for some 
years with the King regarding "provisions for a better education 
and instruction of the children of citizens and peasants," and 
stated to the King that "the object of reform is national educa- 
tion, and its field of operation, therefore, all provinces of the 
monarchy." The King, though, a weak, deeply religious, and 
unimaginative man (Frederick WilHam III, 1 797-1 840), who 
lacked the energy and foresight of his predecessors, did little or 
nothing. Under Frederick William III the State lacked vigor 
and drifted; the Church regained something of its former power; 
and the army and the civil service became corrupt. In 1806 a 
blow fell which brought matters to an immediate crisis and forced 
important action. 



566 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

II. A STATE SCHOOL SYSTEM AT LAST CREATED 
The humiliation of Prussia. At the close of 1804 France, by- 
vote, changed from the Repubhc to an Empire, with Napoleon 
Bonaparte as first Emperor of the French, and for some years he 
took pains that Frenchmen should forget "Liberty and Equal- 
ity" amid the surfeit of "Glory" he heaped upon France. The 
great nations outside France, fearful of Napoleon's ambition and 
power, did not take his accession to the throne of France so com- 
placently, and, in 1805, England, Sweden, Austria, and Russia 
formed the "Third Coahtion" against Napoleon in an effort to 
restore the balance of power in Europe. Of the great powers of 
Europe only Prussia held aloof, refused to take sides, and in con- 
sequence enjoyed a temporary prosperity and freedom from in- 
vasion. For this, though, she was soon to pay a terrible price. 
Having humiliated the Austrians and vanquished the Russians, 
Napoleon now goaded the Prussians into attacking him, and then 
utterly humiliated them in turn. At the battle of Jena (October 
14, 1806) the Prussian army was utterly routed, and forced back 
almost to the Russian frontier. Officered by old generals and 
pohtical favorites who were no longer efficient, and backed by a 
state service honeycombed with inefficiency and corruption, the 
Prussian army that had won such victories under Frederick the 
Great was all but annihilated by the new and efficient fighting 
machine created by the Corsican who now controlled the destinies 
of France. By the Treaty of Tilsit (July 7, 1807) Prussia lost all 
her lands west of the Elbe and nearly all her steahngs from Poland 
— in all about one half her "territory and population — and was 
almost stricken from the list of important powers in Europe. In 
all its history Prussia had experienced no such humihation as this. 
In a few months the constructive work of a century had been un- 
done. 

The regeneration of Prussia. The new national German feel- 
ing, which had been slowly rising for half a century, now burst 
forth and soon worked a regeneration of the State. In the school 
of adversity the King and the people learned much, and the task 
of national reorganization was entrusted to a series of able minis- 
ters whom the King and his capable Queen, Louise, now called 
into service. His chief minister. Stein, created a free people by 
aboHshing serfdom and feudal land tenure (1807); eliminated 
feudal distinctions in business; granted local government to the 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 567 

cities; and broke the hold of the clergy on the educational system. 
His successor, Hardenburg, extended the rights of citizenship, 
and laid the foundations of government by legislative assemblies. 
Another minister, Scharnhorst, reorganized the Prussian army 
(1807-13) by dismissing nearly all the old generals, and introduc- 
ing the principle of compulsory mihtary service. In all branches 
of the government service there were reorganizations, the one 
thought of the leaders being to so reorganize and revitalize the 
State as to enable it in time to overthrow the rule of Napoleon 
and regain its national independence. 

Though the abohtion of serfdom, the reform of the civil service, 
and the beginnings of local and representative government were 
important gains, nothing was of secondary importance to the 
complete reorganization of education which now took place. The 
education of the people was turned to in earnest for the regenera- 
tion of the national spirit, and education was, in a decade, made 
the great constructive agent of the State. Said the King: 

Though we have lost many square miles of land, though the country 
has been robbed of its external power and splendor, yet we shall and 
will gain in intrinsic power and splendor, and therefore it is my earnest 
wish that the greatest attention be paid to public instruction. . . . The 
State must regain in mental force what it has lost in physical force. 

His minister Stein said: 

We proceed from the fundamental principle, to elevate the moral, 
religious, and patriotic spirit in the nation, to instil into it again cour- 
age, self-reliance, and readiness to sacrifice everything for national 
honor and for independence from the foreigner. ... To attain this end, 
we must mainly rely on the education and instruction of the young. If 
by a method founded on the true nature of man, every faculty of the 
mind can be developed, every noble principle of life be animated and 
nourished, all one-sided education avoided, and those tendencies on 
which the power and dignity of men rest, hitherto neglected with the 
greatest indifference, carefully fostered — then we may hope to see 
grow up a generation, physically and morally vigorous, and the begin- 
nings of a better time. 

Fichte appeals to the leaders. Still more did the philosopher 
Fichte (1762-18 14), in a series of "Addresses to the German Na- 
tion," delivered in Berlin during the winter ^ of 1807-08, appeal 
to the leaders to turn to education to rescue the State from the 
miseries which had overwhelmed it. Unable forcibly to resist, 

^ These lectures were listened to by Napoleon's police and passed to print by his 
censor, not being regarded as containing anything seditious or dangerous. 



568 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and with every phase of the government determined by a foreign 
conqueror, only education had been overlooked, he said, and to 
this the leaders should turn for national redemption (R. 277). He 
held that it rested with them to determine 

whether you will be the end and last of a race ... or the beginnings 
and germ of a new time, glorious beyond all your imaginings, and those 
from whom posterity will reckon the years of their welfare. ... A na- 
tion that is capable, if it were only in its highest representation and 
leaders, of fixing its eyes firmly on the vision from the spiritual world, 
Independence, and being possessed with a love of it, will surely prevail 
over a nation that is only used as a tool of foreign aggressiveness and 
for the subjugation of independent nations. 

With a fervor of emotion that was characteristic of a romantic 
age, impelled by a conviction that the distinctive character of the 
German people was indispensable to the world, and holding that 
what was necessary also was possible, Fichte made the German 
leaders feel, with him, that 

to reshape reality by means of ideas is the business of man, his proper 
earthly task; and nothing can be impossible to a will confident of itself 
and of its aim.^ 

Fichte's Addresses stirred the thinkers among the German peo- 
ple as they had not been stirred since the days of the Reforma- 
tion,2 and a national reorganization of education, with national 
ends in view, now took place. As Duke Ernest remade Gotha, 
after the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, by means of education 
(p. 317), so the leaders of Prussia now created a new national 
spirit by taking over the school from the Church and forging it 
into one of the greatest constructive instruments of the State. 
The result showed itself in the "Uprising of Prussia," in the win- 
ter of 181 2-13; the "War of Liberation," of 1813-15; the utter 
defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Leipzig by Russia, Prussia, 
and Austria, in 18 13; and again at the battle of Waterloo by Eng- 

^ "He set all his hopes for Germany on a new national system of education. One 
German State was to lead the way in establishing it, making use of the same right 
of coercion to which it resorted in compelling its subjects to serve in the army, and 
for the exercise of which certainly no better justification could be found than the 
common good aimed at in national education." (Paulsen, Fr., German Education, 
Past and Present, p. 240.) 

2 "Never have the souls of men been so deeply stirred by the idea of raising the 
whole existence of mankind to a higher level. Something like the enthusiasm which 
had taken hold of the minds at the outbreak of the French Revolution was again at 
work, the only difference being that the strong current of national feeling directed 
it toward an aim which, if more limited, was, for that very reason, more practicable 
and more defined." (Paulsen, Fr., German Education, Past and Present, p. 183.) 





(N 


V 






*■ — ^ 




w 


>, 


H 




a 


:n 



>. CO 



2 Ph 



:u£Ji«c«^^ 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 569 

land and Prussia/ in 181 5. Still more clearly was the result 
shown in the humihating defeat of France, in 1870, when it was 
commonly remarked that the schoolmaster of Prussia had at last 
triumphed. The regeneration of Prussia in the early part of the 
nineteenth century, as well as its more recent humiliation, stand 
as eloquent testimonials to the tremendous influence of education 
on national destiny, when rightly and when wrongly directed. 

The reorganization of elementary education. The first step in 
the process of educational reorganization was the abolition (1807) 
of the Oherschulcollcgium Board, established (p. 564) in 1787 to 
supervise secondary and higher education, in order to get rid of 
clerical influence and control. The next step was the creation in- 
stead (1808) of a Department of Public Instruction, organized as 
a branch of the Interior Department of the State. 

One of the first steps of the acting head of the new department 
was to send seventeen Prussian teachers (1808) to Switzerland to 
spend three years, at the expense of the Government, in studying 
Pestalozzi's ideas and methods, and they were particularly en- 
joined that they were not sent primarily to get the mechanical 
side of the method, but to 

warm yourselves at the sacred fire which burns in the heart of this 
man, so full of strength and love, whose work has remained so far 
below what he originally desired, below the essential ideas of his life, 
of which the method is only a feeble product. 

You will have reached perfection when you have clearly seen that 
education is an art, and the most sublime and holy of all, and in what 
connection it is with the great art of the education of nations. 

In 1809 Carl August Zeller (i 774-1847), a pupil of Pestalozzi, 
who had established two Pestalozzian training-colleges in Switzer- 
land and had just begun to hold Pestalozzian institutes in Wiir- 
temberg (p. 545), was called to Prussia to organize a Teachers' 
Seminary (normal school) to train teachers in the Pestalozzian 
methods. The seventeen Prussian teachers, on their return from 
study with Pestalozzi, were also made directors of training insti- 
tutions, or provincial superintendents of instruction. In this 
way Pestalozzian ideas were soon in use in the elementary school 
rooms of Prussia, and so effective was this work, and so readily 
did the Prussian teachers catch the spirit of Pestalozzi's endeav- 

^ As a result of the overthrow of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna restored to 
Prussia and France substantially the boundaries they had at the opening of the 
Napoleonic Wars. Still more important for the future was the consolidation of 
some four hundred States and petty uerman kingdoms into thirty-eight States. 



570 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 171. DiNTER (1760-1831) 

Director of Teachers' Seminaries in 
Saxony; Superintendent of Educa- 
tion in East Prussia. 



ors, that at the BerHn celebration of the centennial of his birth, 
in 1846, the German educator Diesterweg ^ said: 

By these men and these means, men trained in the Institution at 
Yverdon under Pestalozzi, the study of his publications, and the appli- 
cations of his methods in the model and normal schools of Prussia, 

after 1808, was the present Prussian, or 
rather Prussian-Pestalozzian school sys- 
tem established, for he is entitled to at 
least one half the fame of the German 
popular schools. 

Similarly Gustavus Friedrich Din- 
ter, who early distinguished himself 
as principal of a Teachers' Seminary 
in Saxony, was called to Prussia and 
made School Counselor (Superin- 
tendent) for the province of East 
Prussia. Wherever Prussia could 
find men, in other States, who knew 
Pestalozzian methods and possessed 
the new conception of education, 
they were called to Prussia and put 

to work, and the statement of D inter was characteristic of the 

spirit which animated their work. He said: ^ 

I promised God, that I would look upon every Prussian peasant 
child as a being who could complain of me before God, if I did not pro- 
vide him with the best education, as a man and a Christian, which it 
was possible for me to provide. 

Work of the Teachers' Seminaries. Napoleon had unposed 
heavy financial indemnities on Prussia, as well as loss of territory, 
and the material means with which to establish schools were 
scanty indeed. With a keen conception of the practical difficul- 
ties, the leaders saw that the key to the problem lay in the crea- 
tion of a new type of teaching force, and to this end they began 
from the first to establish Teachers' Seminaries. Those who de- 
sired to enter these institutions were carefully selected, and out 
of them a steady stream of what Horace Mann described (R. 278) 
as a "beneficent order of men" were sent to the schools, *'mould- 

^ Friedrich Adolph Wilhelm Diesterweg became a pupil in one of the eariiest 
normal schools in Prussia, that at Frankfort; then a teacher; and in 1820 became a 
director of a Teachers' Seminary at Moers. From 1833 to 1849 he was head of the 
normal school at Berlin. He has often been called "der deutsche Pestalozzi." 

* Made in a letter to Baron von Altenstein, Prussian Minister for Education. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 571 




ing the character of the people, and carrying them forward in 
a career of civilization more rapidly than any other people in 
the world are now advancing." Mann described, with marked 
approval, both the teacher and the 
training he received. 

So successful were these institutions 
that within a decade, under the glow 
of the new national spirit animating 
the people, the elementary schools were 
largely transformed in spirit and pur- 
pose, and the position of the element- 
ary-school teacher was elevated from 
the rank of a trade (R. 279) to that of 
a profession (R. 278). By 1840, when 
the earlier fervor had died out and a 
reaction had clearly set in, there were 
in Prussia alone thirty-eight Teachers' 
Seminaries for elementary teachers, ap- 
proximately thirty thousand element- 
ary schools, and every sixth person in 
Prussia was in school. In the other 
German States, and in Holland, Swe- 
den, and France, analogous but less 

extensive progress in providing normal schools and elementary 
schools had been made; but in Austria, which did not for long 
follow the Prussian example, the schools remained largely sta- 
tionary for more than half a century to come. 

Nationalizing the elementary instruction. That the system of \J 
elementary vernacular or people's schools (the term Volksschule 
now began to be applied) now created should be permeated by a 
strong nationalistic tone was, the times and circumstances con- 
sidered, only natural. Though the Pestalozzian theories as to 
the development of the mental faculties, training through the 
senses, and the power of education to regenerate society were 
accepted, along with the new Pestalozzian subject-matter and 
methods in instruction (p. 543,) all that could be rendered useful 
to the Prussian State in its extremity naturally was given special 
emphasis. Thus all that related to the home country — geogra- 
phy, history, and the German speech — was taught as much 
from the patriotic as from the pedagogical point of view. Music 
was given special emphasis as preparatory for participation in the 



Fig. 172. DiESTERWEG 

(1790-1866) 

Director of Teachers' Semina- 
ries at Maurs (1820-33) and Ber- 
lin (1833-49). "Der deutsche 
Pestalozzi" 



572 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

patriotic singing-societies and festivals, which were organized 
at the time of the "Uprising of Prussia" (1813). Drawing and 
arithmetic were emphasized for their practical values. Physical 
exercises were given an emphasis before unknown, because of 
their hygienic and miHtary values. Finally religion was given an 
importance beyond that of Pestalozzi's school, but with the em- 
phasis now placed on moral earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice, 
and obedience to authority, rather than the earlier stress on the 
Catechism and church doctrine. 

Clearly perceiving, decades ahead of other nations, the power 
of such training to nationalize a people and thus strengthen the 
State, the Prussian leaders, in the first two decades of the nine- 
teenth century, laid the foundations of that training of the 
masses, and of teachers for the masses (R. 280), which, more than 
any other single item, paved the way for the development of a na- 
tional German spirit, the unification of German lands into an Im- 
perial German Empire, and that blind trust in and obedience to 
authority which has recently led to a second national humiliation. 

The reorganization of secondary education. Alongside this 
elementary-school system for the masses of the people, the older 
secondary and higher school system for a directing class (p. 553) 
also was largely reorganized and redirected. The first step in this 
direction was the appointment, in 1809, of Wilhelm von Hum- 
boldt (1767-1835), "a philosopher, scholar, philologist, and 
statesman" of the first rank, to the headship of the new Prussian 
Department of Public Instruction. During the two and a half 
years he remained in charge important work in the reorganization 
of secondary and higher education was accomplished. In 18 17 
the Department of Public Instruction was changed from a bureau 
to an independent Ministry for Spiritual and Instructional Af- 
fairs. By 1825, when governing school boards were ordered es- 
tablished in each province, and made responsible to the Ministry 
for Education at BerHn, the organization of the state school sys- 
tem was virtually complete. For the next half-century the 
changes made were in the nature of the perfection of bureaucratic 
organization, rather than any fundamental organizing change. 
During the early years improvements of great future importance 
for secondary education were effected in the creation of a well- 
educated, professional teaching body, and in the standardization 
of courses and of work. 

In 1 810 the examination of all secondary-school teachers, ac- 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 573 

cording to a uniform state plan, was ordered. The examinations 
were to be conducted for the State by the university authorities; 
to be based on university training in the g>'mnasial subjects, with 
an opportunity to reveal special preparation in any subject or sub- 
jects; and no one in the future could even be nominated for a posi- 
tion as a gymnasial teacher who had not passed this examination. 
This meant the erection of the work of teaching in the secondary 
schools into a distinct profession ; the elimination from the schools 
of the theological student who taught for a time as a stepping- 
stone to a church living; and the end of easy local examination 
and approval by town authorities or the patrons of a school. To 
insure still better preparation of candidates, Pedagogical Seminars 
were begun in the universities ^ for imparting to future g>'mnasial 
teachers some pedagogical knowledge and insight, while Philo- 
logical Seminars also appeared, about the same time,- to give ad- 
ditional training in understanding the spirit of instruction in the 
chief subjects of the gymnasial course — the classics. In 1826 a 
year of trial teaching before appointment {Prohejahr) was added 
for all candidates, and in 183 1 new and more stringent regulations 
for the examination of teachers were ordered.^ At least two gen- 
erations ahead of other nations, Prussia thus developed a body of 
professional teachers for its secondary schools. 

Unification of the secondary schools. In 181 2 the Leaving 
Examinations {Maturitdtspriifung), instituted in 1788, but in- 
effective through clerical opposition, were revived and strictly 
enforced. In 1834 the passing of such an examination was made 
necessary to entering nearly all branches of the state civil service, 
thus securing an educated body of minor public officials. This 
same year the universities gave up their entrance examinations, 
and have since depended entirely on the Leaving Examinations of 
the State. 

^ "Herbart's seminar at the university of Konigsberg was officially recognized, 
in 1810; Gedike's seminar in Berlin was formally taken over by the university, in 
1812; the seminar in Stettin, founded in 1804, was reorganized in 1816; Breslau 
began pedagogical work, in 1813; and in 1817 it was stated that the purpose of the 
reorganized seminar in Halle was ' the training of skilled teachers for the Gymnasien.' " 
(Russell, James E., German Higher Schools, p. 97.) 

2 Gesner at Gottingen and Wolff at Halle laid down the Hnes for these in the middle 
eighteenth century. The early nineteenth-century foundations were at Konigsberg, 
1810; Berlin, 181 2; Breslau, 181 2; Bonn, 1819; Griefswald, 1820; and Miinster, 1825. 

' AH prospective gymnasial teachers, whether graduates of the universities or 
not, were now required to take examinations in philosophy, pedagogy, theology, 
and the main gymnasial subjects, showing marked proficiency in one of the following 
groups, and a reasonable knowledge of the other two: namely, (i) Greek, Latin, 
German; (2) Mathematics and the Natural Sciences; (3) History and Geography. 



574 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The immediate effect of the reinstitution of the Leaving Ex- 
aminations was to unify the work of all the different surviving 
types of classical secondary schools — Gymnasium, Lyceum, 
Pddagogium, Collegium, Lateinische Schule, Akademie — all 
standard nine-year schools henceforth taking the name of Gym- 
nasien. Those institutions which could not meet the standards 
of a nine-year classical school were either permitted to do the first 
six years of the work, being known as Pro-Gymnasien, or the mod- 
ern languages were substituted for the ancient, and they became 
middle-class institutions under the name of Biirgerschulen. A 
few Realschulen also were in existence, and these were permitted 
to continue, as middle-class institutions, but without any state 
recognition. Thus, without the destruction of institutions, the 
accumulated foundations of the centuries were transformed into 
a series of organized state schools to serve the needs of the State. 

The next step was the promulgation of a uniform course of in- 
struction for all Gymnasien and Pro-Gymnasien. This was done 
in 1816. The studies were Latin, Greek, German, mathematics, 
history, geography, religion, and science, the amount of time to 
be devoted to each ranging, in the order Hsted, from a maximum 
for Latin to a minimum for science. Up to 1824 Greek was not 
absolutely required; from 1824 to 1837 it was required, unless the 
substitution of a modern language was permitted; but after 1837, 
when the type of German secondary school had become fairly 
well fixed, and the devotion to humanistic studies had reached a 
climax, Greek became a fixed and unvarying requirement.^ 

Founding of the University of Berlin. One result of the Treaty 
of Tilsit (p. 566) was that Prussia had lost all her universities, 
except three along the Baltic coast. Both Halle and Gottingen 
were lost, and the loss of Halle was a severe blow. In 1807 
Fichte, who had been a professor at Jena, drew up a plan and sub- 
mitted it to the King for the organization of a new university at 
Berlin. When Humboldt came to the head of the Department of 
Public Instruction the idea at once won his enthusiastic approval. 
In May, 1809, he reported favorably on the project to the King, 
and three months later a Cabinet Order was issued creating the 
new university, giving it an annual money grant, and assigning a 
royal palace to it for a home. The spirit with which the new in- 
stitution was founded may be inferred from the following extract 

1 See Russell, Jas. E., German Higher Schools, p. loi, for the detailed "Gymna- 
sial Program" promulgated in 1837. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 575 

from a memorial, published by Humboldt, in 18 10. In this he 
said: 

The State should not treat the universities as if they were higher 
classical schools or schools of special sciences. On the whole the State 
should not look to them at all for anything that directly concerns its 
own interests, but should rather cherish a conviction that, in fulfiUing 
their real destination, they will not only serve its own purposes, but 
serve them on an infinitely higher plane, commanding a much wider 
field of operation, and affording room to set in motion much more 
eflacient springs and forces than are at the disposal of the State itself. 

This university was indeed a new creation, and of far more sig- 
nificance for the future of university work than even the founding 
of Halle had been. To the selection of its first faculty Humboldt 
devoted almost all his energies during the period he remained in 
office. From the first, high attainment in some branch of knowl- 
edge, and the ability to advance that knowledge, was placed ahead 
of mere teaching skill. The most eminent scholars in all lines 
were invited to the new "chairs," and when it opened (1810) its 
first faculty represented the highest attainment of scholarship in 
German lands. From the first the instruction divested itself of 
almost all that characterized the school. The lecture replaced the 
classroom recitation, and the seminar, in which small groups of 
advanced students investigate a problem under the direction of a 
professor, was given a place of large importance in the institution. 
Original research and contributions to knowledge marked the 
work of both students and professors, the object being, not to 
train teachers for the schools, but to produce scholars capable of 
advancing knowledge by personal research. Even more than at 
Halle, the institution was a place where professors and students 
worked to discover truth, uninfluenced by any preconceived no- 
tions and unmindful of what older ideas might be upset in the 
process. The value of such pioneer work for university scholars 
everywhere is not likely to be overestimated. 

Specialization in university instruction emphasized. Speciali- 
zation in some field of knowledge soon came to be the ruling idea, 
and this proved exceedingly fruitful in the years which followed. 
There Bopp developed the study of comparative grammar on the 
basis of the Sanskrit. There Dietz founded Romance philology. 
RitschI turned his students to the study of Latin inscriptions to 
reconstruct the past. Lepsius began the study of Egyptology 
with a spade. Niebuhr's Roman History (181 1) was the institu- 
tion's fijst fruit, and his successor, Ranke, showed his students 



576 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

how to study history from the sources. Hegel, Schopenhauer, 
and Lotze made over philosophy. Fechner and Wundt began 
there the study of experimental psychology. Stahl and von 
Savigny created new standards in the study of law. Miiller in- 
troduced the microscope into the study of pathological anatomy. 
Schultze systematized zoology. Liebig, who had opened at 
Giessen (1824) what was probably the first chemical laboratory in 
the world open to students, was drawn to Berlin and created there 
a new chemistry. Still later, Helmholtz created there a new 
physics. 

The effect of all this on the expansion of the work of the philo- 
sophical faculty was marked. The new philological and historical 
sciences, the biological sciences, and the mathematical sciences, 
were all greatly expanded in scope, and the new philosophical 
faculty, evolved out of the old arts faculty (p. 554), now attained 
to the place of first importance in the university — a position it 
has ever since retained. Law and medicine were also given a new 
direction and emphasis, and even the teaching of theology was 
greatly improved under the specialization in instruction and the 
freedom in teaching which now became the rule. 

The effect on the other German universities was marked. 
Some of the older institutions (Erfurt, Wittenberg, Cologne, 
Mainz) died out, while new foundations (Breslau, 181 1; Bonn, 
1818; Munich, 1826) after the new model, took their place. Those 
that continued were changed in character,^ and a new unity 
was established throughout the German university world. By 
1850 exact scientific research, in both libraries and laboratories, 
and a sober search for truth, had become the watchword of all the 
German universities. In consequence they naturally assumed a 
world leadership, and were frequented by students from many 
lands. Especially has the United States been influenced in its 
university development by the large number of university teach- 
ers who received their specialized training in the German univer- 
sities ^ during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The lec- 

1 In 1840 there were six Prussian universities; by 1900 the number had increased 
to eleven, and three technical universities in addition. In the other German States 
eleven additional universities and six technical universities were in existence, in 
1900. 

2 Benjamin Franklin visited Gottingen, as early as 1766, but the first American 
student to take a degree at a German university was Benjamin S. Barton, of Phila- 
delphia, who took his doctor's degree at Gottingen, in 1799. By 1825 ten American 
students had studied one or more semesters at Gottingen. That year tlie first 
American student registered at Berlin, and in 1827 the first at Leipzig. (See Hins- 
?!alej B. A., in Report, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1897-98, vol. i, pp. 603-16.) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 577 






21 



:~---a;. 



ture, the seminar, laboratory investigation, research, the doctor- 
ate, and academic freedom in study and teaching are distinctive 
contributions to our university development drawn from German 
lands, and superimposed on our earlier EngUsh-type college. 
The founding of Johns Hopkins University, at Baltimore, in 
1876, on the German model, marked the erection of the first dis- 
tinctively research university in America. 

A two-class state school system created. We thus see that 
Prussia by 181 5, clearly by 1825, had taken over education from 
the Church and made of it an instru- 
ment of the State to serve State ends. 
For the masses there was the Volks- 
schule, superseding the old religious 
vernacular school and clearly designed 
to create an intelligent but obedient 
and patriotic citizenship for the Father- 
land, and in this school the great ma- 
jority of the children of the State re- 
ceived their education for citizenship 
and for life. This was for both sexes, 
and was entirely a German school. At- 
tendance upon this school was made 
compulsory, and beyond this some con- 
tinuation education early began to be 
provided (Rs. 274, §6; 275 d; 276, 
§ 15). Within the past half-century 
continuation education, especially along 
vocational lines, as we shall point 
out in a subsequent chapter, has re- 
ceived in German lands a very re- 
markable development. To insure that 
this school should serve the State in 
the way desired. Teachers' Seminaries, 
for the training of Volksschule teachers, were from the first 
made a feature of the new state system. 

For those who were to form the official and directing class of 
society — a closely limited, almost entirely male, intellectual 
aristocracy — education in separate classical schools, with uni- 
versity or professional training superimposed, was provided, and 
this type of training ofTered a very thorough preparation for a 
wnall and a carefully selected class. Out of this class the leaders 



10 

Transfer 
9— 



Educates Educates 

about 92 ' about 8 ", 

Fig. 173. The Prussian 

State School System 

Created 

Compare with Fig. 209 and 
note the difference between a 
European two-class school sys- 
tem and the American demo- 
cratic educational ladder. 



578 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

of Germany for a century have been drawn. ^ For this classical 
school also the universities were early directed to prepare a well- 
educated body of teachers. The Prussian plan was followed in 
all its essentials in the other German States, so that the drawing 
given (Fig. 173) was true for Germany as a whole, as well as for 
Prussia, up at least to 19 14. 

New nineteenth-century tendencies manifested. In this early 
evolution of the Prussian state school systems we find two promi- 
nent nineteenth-century ideas expressing themselves. The first 
is the new conception of the State as not merely a government 
organized to secure national safety and protection from invasion, 
but rather an organization of the people to promote pubHc wel- 
fare and reahze a moral and political ideal. To this end state 
control of the whole range of education, to enable the State to 
promote intellectual and moral and social progress along lines use- 
ful to the State, became a necessity, and some form of this educa- 
tion, in the interests of the public welfare, must now be extended 
to all. Though France and the new American nation gave earlier 
political expression to this new conception of the State, it was in 
Prussia that the idea attained its earliest concrete and for long its 
most complete realization. Seeing further and more clearly than 
other nations the possibilities of education, the practical workers 
of Prussia, and after them the other German States, took over 
education as a function of the State for the propagation of the na- 
tional ideas and the promotion of the national culture. Of this 
development Paulsen says: 

In the nineteenth century Germany took the lead in the educational 
movement among the nations of Europe. The German universities 
have become acknowledged centers of scientific research for the whole 
world. ... In the domain of primary and technical education Ger- 
many has also become the universal teacher of Europe. 

But it must not be forgotten, in this connection, that the German 
people had been the pupils of their neighbors during a greater length 
of time and with greater assiduity than any other European nation. 
Thus, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Germany imported the 
culture of Humanism from Italy. During the seventeenth and eight- 
eenth centuries she introduced the modern courtly culture and lan- 
guage of the French people, besides giving admission, since the middle 

^ The remark attributed to Bismarck is interesting in this connection. "Ot 
the students who attend the German universities," he said, "one-third die prema- 
turely as the result of disease arising from too great poverty and under-nourishment 
while students; another one-third die prematurely or amount to little due to bad 
habits and drinking and disease contracted while students; the remaining third rule 
Europe." 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 579 

of the eighteenth century, to the philosophy, science, and Hterature of 
English middle-class society. Lastly, since the end of the eighteenth 
century, the Germans have yielded themselves to the influence of the 
Hellenic spirit with greater fervor than any other nation. 

The second nineteenth-century idea which early found expres- 
sion in the Prussian State, and one which became a dominant fac- 
tor during the latter half of the century, was the idea of utilizing 
the schools, as state institutions, to promote national ends — to 
unify and nationalize peoples. National self-consciousness here 
first found concrete expression, and with wonderful practical re- 
sults. From a geographical expression, consisting of nearly four 
hundred petty self-governing cities, principalities, and states, and 
some fourteen hundred independent noblemen and prelates, be- 
fore the Napoleonic wars, their close found the German people free 
from serfdom, united in spirit, and organized politically into thirty- 
eight modern- type States. In 1870, largely as a result of the na- 
tionalizing efforts of government and education, working hand in 
hand, an Lnperial Empire of twenty-two States and three Free 
Cities was formed. The struggle for national realization, begun 
by Prussia after 1807, and with education as the important con- 
structive tool of the State, has since been copied by nation after 
nation and has become the dominant force of modern history. 
To awaken a national self-consciousness, to acquire national 
unity, and to infuse into all a common culture has supplanted 
the humanistic cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century and 
become the dominant characteristic of nineteenth-century polit- 
ical history. In this Prussia led the way. 

The period of reaction. Through the period preceding the 
Wars of Liberation (1813-15), and afterward for a few years, an 
educational zeal animated the Government. The schools dur- 
ing this period were free on the one hand from politics and on 
the other from minute official regulation. As one writer well 
stated: ^ 

It was diflficult to decide whether the schools derived their impor- 
tance from the life which surged around them, or whether their impor- 
tance was due to their intrinsic power, very carefully fostered by the 
state authorities. . . . There was spirit and life in Prussia; there was 
much activity and liberty in contriving, with little outward parade. 
Any foreigner, visiting Prussia, might observe that the vitalizing 
breath of government, like the spirit of God, was acting upon the 
whole people. 

^ Barnard, Henry, American Journal of Education, vol. xx, p. 365. 



58o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Napoleon was finally vanquished at Waterloo (1815) and sent 
to Saint Helena, and the Congress of Vienna (181 5) remade the 
map of Europe. In doing so it forgot that the people wanted 
constitutional government, instead of a return to absolute rulers. 
It restored old thrones, rights, and territories, and inaugurated a 
policy of poHtical reaction which increased in intensity with time 
and dominated the governments of continental Europe until after 
the middle of the century. Under the lead of the Austrian minis- 
ter, Metternich, and by "third-degree" methods, the so-called 
Holy Alliance ^ of continental Europe suppressed free speech, 
democratic movements, political liberties, university freedom, 
and liberalism in government and reHgion. The governments in 
this Alliance redirected and restricted the people's schools, as 
much as could be done, to make them conform in purpose to their 
reactionary ideas. In consequence, the development of popular 
education in Germany, as well as in France and other continental 
lands, was for a time checked. The great start obtained by 
Frussia and the German States before 1820, though, was such 
that what had been done there could not be wholly undone. In 
France, Spain, the Italian Kingdoms, the Austrian States, and 
Russia, on the other hand, what had not been developed to any 
extent could be prevented from developing, and in these lands 
popular education was given back to the Church to control and 
direct. In England, also, though for other reasons there, the 
Church retained its control over elementary education for half a 
century longer. 

Change in the spirit of the schools. The King of Prussia, 
Frederick William III (i 797-1 840), though he had given full ad- 
herence to the movement for general education during the dark 
period of Prussian history, was after all never fully in sympathy 
with the liberal aspect of the movement. After Austria, by the 
settlement at Vienna, became the leader of the German States, 
and Metternich the dominating political personality of Europe, 
the King came more and more to favor a restriction of liberties 
and the holding of education to certain rather limited lines, fearful 
that too much education of the people might prove harmful to the 
Government. Accordingly, under the influence of the King and 

1 This was proposed by Czar Alexander I of Russia in 1815, and became a per- 
sonal alliance of the Czar of Russia, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of 
Prussia, "to promote religion, peace, and order." Other princes were asked to join 
this continental League to enforce peace and, under the rule of Prince Metternich, 
chief minister of Austria, it dominated Europe until after the political revolutions 
il 1848. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 581 

against the desires of the liberal leaders, Prussia now changed di- 
rection and embarked on a policy of reaction which checked nor- 
mal educational progress; led to the unsuccessful revolution of 
1848 and the subsequent almost fanatical governmental opposi- 
tion to reforms; and was in large part responsible for the disaster 
of 1918. It is an interesting speculation as to how different the 
future German and world history might have been had Prussia 
and the German States held to the liberal ideas of the earlier pe- 
riod, and drawn their political conceptions from England and the 
new American nation, rather than from Austria and Russia. 

Accordingly, in November, 181 7, the Department of Public 
Instruction was replaced by a Ministry for Spiritual, Educa- 
tional, and Medical Afifairs, and Karl, Baron von Altenstein, was 
made Minister. He continued in office until his death, ^ in 1840, 
and his administration was marked by an increasing state cen- 
tralization and limitation of the earlier plans. In 1819 he codi- 
fied all previous practices into a general school law for the king- 
dom. While the King never really approved and issued it, it 
nevertheless became a basis for future work and is the law so en- 
thusiastically described by Cousin, in 1830 (R. 280). Under his 
administration the earlier creative enthusiasm and the energy for 
the execution of great ideas disappeared, and the earlier ''stimu- 
lating and encouraging attitude on the part of the authorities was 
now replaced by the timid policy of the drag and the brake." 
The earlier preparatory work in the development of Teachers' 
Seminaries and the establishment of elementary schools was al- 
lowed to continue; Pestalozzian ideas were for a time not seri- 
ously restricted; compulsory attendance was more definitely or- 
dered enforced, in 1825; the abolition of tuition fees for Volks- 
schule education was begun in 1833, but not completed until 
1888; and a more careful supervision of schools was instituted, in 
1834. The great change was rather in the spirit and direction of 
the instruction. The early tendency to emphasize nationalism 
and religious instruction (p. 571) was now stressed, and the lib- 
eral aspects of Pestalozzianism were increasingly subordinated to 
the more formal instruction and to nationalistic ends. The sol- 
dier and the priest joined hands in diverting the schools to the 

^ As a young man Altenstein had been in charge of a subordinate division of the 
Department of Public Instruction under Humboldt, and was a man of somewhat 
liberal ideas. Now he v/as compelled to fall in with the ideas of the political leaders 
and the wishes of the king, though he still did something to hold back the reactionary 
forces and preserve much of what had been gained. 



582 HISTORY OF EDUCATION" 

creation of intelligent, devout, patriotic, and, above all else, obedi- 
ent Germans, while the universal military idea, brought in by the 
successful work of Scharnhorst (p. 567), and retained after the 
War of Liberation as a survival of the old dynastic and predatory 
conception of the State, was more and more emphasized in the 
work of the schools and the life of the citizen. When Horace 
Mann reported on his visit to the schools of the German States, in 
1843, he called attention to this element of weakness (R. 281), as 
well as to their many elements of strength. 

Further intolerance and reaction. The reactionary tendencies 
which set in after the settlement of Vienna had, by 1840, produced 
stagnation in the life of the Governments of Europe, and the revo- 
lutions of 1848, which broke out in France, Italy, Switzerland, 
and the different German and Austrian States, were revolts 
against the reactionary governmental rule and an expression of 
disappointment at the failure to secure constitutional govern- 
ment. The revolutions were both successful and unsuccessful — 
successful in that the greater liberty they sought came later on, 
but unsuccessful at the time. In consequence, immediately fol- 
lowing 1848, an even more reactionary educational policy was 
instituted. University freedom was markedly restricted; the in- 
stitutions lost their earlier vigor; and the number of students suf- 
fered a marked decline in consequence. The secondary schools 
also felt the new influences. Latin and Greek were made com- 
pulsory; uniform programs for work were insisted upon; and 
Latin in particular was reduced to a grammatical drill that de- 
stroyed the spirit of the earlier instruction and put gymnasia' 
teaching back almost to the type made so popular by Sturm 
The few Realschulen, which had continued to exist and were tol- 
erated before, were now treated with positive dislike. In 1859 
they, were able to force their first official recognition, but only 
when changed from practical schools for the middle classes to 
secondary schools, on the same basis as the Gymnasien, and for 
parallel ends. 

It was upon the elementary schools (Volksschulen) and the 
Teachers' Seminaries that the most severe official displeasure 
now fell. A number of Volksschtile teachers had been connected 
with the revolutions of 1848, and "over-education" was regarded 
as responsible. The Teachers' Seminary at Preslau, which had 
for long given a high grade of training, was closed, and the head of 
the Seminary at Berlin, Diesterweg, was dismissed because of his 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 583 

strong advocacy of Pestalozzian ideas. Anything savoring of 
individualism was especially under the ban. Bitter reproaches 
were heaped upon the elementary- school teachers, and the new 
King, Frederick WiUiam IV (1840-61) considered their work as 
the very root of the political evils of the State. To a conference 
of Seminary teachers, held in 1849 in Berlm, he said: ^ 

You and you alone are to blame for all the misery which the last 
year has brought upon Prussia! The irreligious pseudo-education of 
the masses is to be blamed for it, which you have been spreading under 
the name of true wisdom, and by which you have eradicated religious 
belief and loyalty from the hearts of my subjects and alienated their 
affections from my person. This sham education, strutting about like 
a peacock, has always been odious to me. I hated it already from the 
bottom of my soul before I came to the throne, and, since my accession, 
I have done everything I could to suppress it. I mean to proceed on 
this path, without taking heed of any one, and, indeed, no power on 
earth shall divert me from it. 

Thus easily did an autocratic Hohenzollern cast upon the shoul- 
ders of others the burden of his own failure to grasp the evolution 
in political thinking ^ which had taken place in Europe, since 
1789. Unfortunately 
for the future of the 
German people he was 
able to force his will 
upon them. 

In 1854 new "Reg- 
ulations" were issued 
which put the course 
of instruction for ele- 
mentary schools back 
to the days of Freder- 
ick the Great. The 
one-class rural ele- 
mentary school was 

made the standard. Everything beyond reading, writing, a little 
arithmetic, and religious instruction in strict accordance with the 
creeds of the Church, was considered as superfluous, and was to 
be allowed only by special permit. The elimination of illiteracy, 

1 Paulsen, Fr., German Education, Past and Present, p. 246. 

2 It was this same Frederick William IV who had for a time refused to grant con- 
stitutional government to Prussia, saying: "No written sheet of paper shall ever 
thrust itself like a second providence between the Lord God in heaven and this 
land." In 1850, however, he was forced to grant a Hmited form of constitutional 
government to his people. 



Progress of Elementary Education as shown 
BY THE Decrease in Illiteracy in Prussia, 
BY Provinces 

(From Rep. U.S. Com. Educ, 1899-1900, i, p. 781) 



Provinces 



East Prussia. . . . 
West Prussia . . . . 
Brandenburg. . . 

Pomerania 

Posen 

Silesia 

Saxony , 

Westphalia 

Rhenish Prussia. 
Hohenzollern . . . 



The State. 



1841 



Per cent. 

1 15-33 
2.47 
1.23 
41.00 
9. 22 
1. 19 
2.14 
7.06 



1864-65 



Per cent. 

16. S4 

.96 

1.47 

16.90 

3.78 

• 49 

1.03 

1. 13 



Per cent. 

J 7.05 

- 79 



2.38 



1894-95 



Per cent. 

99 

23 



584 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the creation of obedient citizens, and the nationalizing of new 
elements became the aim of the schools. 

The instruction in the Teachers' Seminaries was reduced to the 
merest necessities, and they were given clearly to understand that 
they were to train teachers, and not to prepare educated men. 
All theory of education, all didactics, all psychology were elimi- 
nated. A return was made to the subject-matter theory of educa- 
tion, and a limited subject-matter at that, and it once more be- 
came the business of the teacher to see that this was carefully 
learned. Religious instruction naturally once more came to hold 
a place of first importance. Similar reactionary movements 
took place in other German States, all being sensitive to the re- 
actionary spirit of the time and the leadership of Austria and 
Prussia. 

The modern German educational purpose. After about i860, 
largely in response to modern scientific and industrial forces 
among a people turning from agriculture toward industriahsm, a 
slight relaxation of the reactionary legislation began to be evident. 
This expressed itself chiefly in a diminution of the time given to 
memoriter work in religion, and the introduction in its place of 
work in German history and geography, with some work in natu- 
ral science. In the Teachers' Seminaries instruction in German 
literature, formerly rigidly excluded, was now added. It was 
not, however, until after the unification of Germany, following 
the Franco-Prussian War, and the creation of Imperial Germany 
under the directive guidance of Bismarck, that any real change 
took place. Then the changes were due to new political, religious, 
social, industrial, and economic forces which belong to the later 
period of German history. 

In 1872 a new law gave to the Prussian elementary schools a 
new course of study; reasserted the authority of the State in edu- 
cation ; extended the control of the pubHc authorities ; and made 
the State instead of the Church the authority even for their reli- 
gious instruction.^ The schools were now to be used as of old to 
build up and strengthen the nation, but particularly to support 
the new Prussian idea as to the work and function of the State. 

^ "The motive which dictated the law of 1872 on school supervision (namely, 
placing the State in complete control of the supervision of religious as well as other 
instruction) was, as is well understood, to strengthen the hands of the government 
in its struggle with the Catholic hierarchy, which was then prominently before the 
public. The law affirmed again the sovereign right of the State over the whole school 
system, including the elementary or people's schools." (Nohle, Dr. E., History oj 
the German School System, p. yg.) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 585 

Realien were given a new prominence, because of new industrial 
needs, and the instruction in religion was revamped. The old 
memoriter work was greatly reduced, and in its place an emotional 
and political emphasis was given to the religious instruction. To 
make the school of the people an instrument for fighting the 
growtli of social democracy, and a support for the throne and 
government, instruction in religion was "placed in the center of 
the teacher's work," and teachers were given to understand that 
they were "members of an educational army and expected loy- 
ally to follow the flag." The secondary schools also were redi- 
rected. A new emphasis on scientific subjects and modern lan- 
guages replaced the earlier emphasis on Greek. The Emperor 
interfered (R. 368) to force a revision of the gymnasial programs 
better to adapt them to modern needs. In particular were the 
universities of all the States unified and nationalized, and great 
technical universities created. Science, commerce, technical work, 
modern languages, and government were stressed in the in- 
struction of the leaders. 

Deciding clearly where the nation was to go and the route it 
was to follow, and that education for national ends was one of the 
important means to be employed, the different parts of the edu- 
cational systems in the States — ■ elementary schools, secondary 
schools, universities, normal schools, professional schools, techni- 
cal schools, continuation schools — were carefully integrated into 
a unified state system, thoroughly national in spirit, and given a 
definite function to perform in the work which the Nation set 
itself to carry through. Nowhere have teachers been so well 
trained to play their part in a national plan, and nowhere have 
teachers acquitted themselves more worthily, from the point of 
view of the Government. As Alexander ^ has well said : 

During the nineteenth century the leaders of Germany decided that 
Germany should assume leadership in the world in every line of en- 
deavor, particularly in commerce and world power. They set this as 
the very definite goal of their national ambition. The next question 
was how that aim could be accomplished. It was to be done through 
education. Accordingly school systems were organized with this aim 
in view. In a State such as the Germans proposed building there were 
to be leaders and followers. The followers were to be trained for a 
docile, efiicient German citizenship; that is, the lower classes were to 
be made into God-fearing, patriotic, economically-independent Ger- 
mans. This was the task of the Volksschule, and it has been wonder- 

1 Alexander, Thomas, The Prussian Elementary Schools, pp. 537-38. 



586 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

fully well accomplished. This type of German is created to do the 
manual labor of the State. 

The leaders were to be trained in middle and higher schools and in 
the universities. There were to be different grades of leaders; leaders 
in the lower walks of life, leaders in the middle walks of life, and leaders 
of the nation. The higher schools and the universities were employed 
to produce these types of leaders. . . . The leaders think and do; the 
followers merely do. The schools were organized for the express pur- 
pose of producing just these types. 

So well was this system and plan working that, had the Imperial 
Government not been so impatient of that slower but surer prog- 
ress by peaceful means, and staked all on a gambler's throw, in 
another half-century the German nation might have held the 
world largely in fee. As it is, the results which the Germans at- 
tained by reason of definite aims and definite methods are both an 
encouragement and a warning to other nations. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Point out the extent of the educational reorganization which resulted 
from the reform work begun at Halle. 

2. How do you explain the very early German interest in compulsory school 
attendance, when such was unknown elsewhere in Europe? 

3. Compare the Prussian Regulations of 1737 with what was common 
at that time in practice in the parishes of the American Colonies. 

4. Show the wisdom of the early Prussian kings in working at school reform 
through the Church. Could they well have worked otherwise? Why? 

5. How do you explain such a slow development of a professional teaching 
body in Prussia, when all the state influences had for so long been favor- 
able to educational development? 

6. Show that the OberschulcoUegium Board marked the beginnings of a 
State Ministry for Education for Prussia. 

7. Show that the spirit of the Prussian leaders, after 1806, was a further 
expansion of the German national feeling which arose in the Period of 
Enlightenment. 

8. Show that the reorganization of elementary education, and the creation 
of the University of Berlin, were almost equally important events for the 
future of German lands. 

9. Show that the work of Prussia, in using the schools for national ends, 
was: (o) in keeping with the work of the French Revolutionary leaders, 
and (b) only a further extension of the organizing work done by 
Frederick the Great. 

10. Show how the universities of Germany early took the lead of the univer- 
sities of the world, and the influence of this fact on national progress. 

11. Enumerate the new nineteenth-century tendencies observable in the 
early educational organization in Prussia. 

i2. Explain the marked mid-nineteenth-century reaction to educational 
development which set in. 

13. Explain the early and marked welcome accorded science-study in Ger- 
man lands. 

14. Explain in what ways Prussia attained an educational leadership, ahead 
of other nations. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN PRUSSIA 587 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections, illustrative 
of the contents of this chapter, are reproduced: 

273. Barnard: The Organizing Work of Frederick William I. 

274. Prussia: The School Code of 1763. 

275. Prussia: The Silesian School Code of 1765. 

276. Austria: The School Code of 1774. 

277. Fichte: Addresses to the German Nation. 

278. Mann: The Prussian Elementary Teacher and his Training. 

279. Dinter: Prussian Schools and Teachers as he found them. 

280. Cousin: Report on Education in Prussia. 

281. Mann: The Military Aspect of Prussian Education. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Explain the interest of Frederick William I (273) in elementary educa- 
tion. 

2. Characterize, from the Codes of 1763 (274) and 1765 (275), and cite 
paragraph to show: (a) The type of instruction ordered provided; {b) 
the type of teacher expected; (c) the character of the attendance re- 
quired; and {d) the character of the continuation training ordered. 

3. Show the similarity in their main lines of the Prussian (274) and Aus- 
trian (276) Codes. 

4. Would the reasoning of Fichte (277) apply to any crushed nation? 
Illustrate. 

5. Do we select teachers for training as carefully in the United States to- 
day as they did in Prussia eighty years ago (278)? Could we? 

6. Did such conditions as Dinter describes (279) exist, even later, with us? 

7. Was the Prussian school system, as described by Cousin (280), a cen- 
tralized or a decentralized system? 

8. Show that Mann's reasoning as to the strength of the Prussian school 
system (281) was thoroughly sound. 

SELECTED REFERENCES 

*Alexander, Thomas. The Prussian Elementary Schools. 
*Barnard, Henry. "Public Instruction in Prussia"; in American Journal 
of Education, vol. xx, pp. 333-434. 
Barnard, Henry. German Teachers and Educators. 
*Cassell, Henry. "Adolph Diesterweg"; in Eddcational Review, vol. I, 
PP- 345-56. (April, 1891.) 
Friedel, V. H. The German School as a War Nursery. 
Lexis, W. A General View of the History and Organization of Ptiblic Edu- 
cation in the German Empire. 
*Nohle, E. "History of the German School System"; in Report U.S. 
Commissioner of Education, 1897-98, vol. i, pp. 3-82. Translated from 
Rein's Encyclopddisches Handbuch der Padagogik. 
*Paulsen, Fr. German Education, Past and Present. 
*Paulsen, Fr. The German Universities. 
*Russell, James. German Higher Schools. 
Seeley, J. R. Life and Times of Stein, vol. i. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE AND ITALY 

I. NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 

Lines of development marked out by the Revolution. The 

Revolution proved very disastrous to the old forms of education 
In France. The old educational foundations, accumulated 
through the ages, were swept away, and the teaching congrega- 
tions, which had provided the people with whatever education 
they had enjoyed, were driven from the soil. The ruin of educa- 
tional and religious institutions in Russia under the recent rule 
of the Bolshevists is perhaps comparable to what happened in 
France. Many plans were proposed by the Revolutionary philos- 
ophers and enthusiasts, as we have seen (chapter xx), to replace 
what had once been and to provide better than had once been 
done for the educational needs of the masses of the people, but 
with results that were small in comparison with the expectations 
of the legislative assemblies which considered or approved them. 
Nevertheless, the directions of future progress in educational 
organization were clearly marked out before Napoleon came to 
power, and the work which he did was largely an extension, and a 
reduction to working order, of what had been proposed or estab- 
lished by the enthusiasts of the pre-revolutionary and revolution- 
ary periods. At the time of the Revolution the State definitely 
took over the control of education from the Church, and the work 
of Napoleon and those who came after him was to organize pubhc 
instruction into a practical state-controlled system. 

In effecting this organization, the preceding discussions of edu- 
cation as a function of the State and the desirable forms of organi- 
zation to follow all bore important fruit, and the forms finally 
adopted embodied not only the ideas contained in the legislation 
of the revolutionary assemblies, but the earlier theoretical discus- 
sion of the subject by Rolland (p. 510), Diderot (p. 511), and 
Talleyrand (p. 513) as well. They embodied also the peculiar 
administrative genius of France — that desire for uniformity in 
organization and administration — and hence stand in contrast to 
the state educational organizations worked out about the same 
time in German lands. The German States, as we have seen, had 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 589 

for long been working toward state control of education, but 
when this was finally attained they still permitted a large degree 
of local initiative and control. The French, on the contrai-y, 
made the transition in a few years, and the system of state control 
which they established provided for uniformity, and for central- 
ized supervision and inspection in the hands of the State. The 




Fig. 174. An Old Foundation transformed 

This was an ancient chateau in France. In 1604 Henry IV gave it to 
the Jesuits for a school. In 1791 it became national property, and was 
transformed into a Military College 

forms for state control and education adopted in the two coun- 
tries were also expressive of age-long tendencies in each. For 
three centuries German political organization, as we have seen, 
had been extremely decentralized on the one hand, and had been 
slowly evolving a system of education under the joint control of 
the small States and the Church on the other. In France, on the 
contrary, centralization of authority and subordination to a cen- 
tral government had been the tendency for an even longer period. 
When the time arrived for the State to take over education from 
the Church, it was but natural that France should tend toward a 
much more highly centralized control than did the German 
States, and the differing political situations of the two countries, 
at the opening of the nineteenth century, gave added emphasis to 
these differing tendencies. 

In consequence, Prussia and the other German States early 
achieved a form of state educational organization which empha- 



590 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



sized local interest and the spirit of the instruction, whereas 
France created an administrative organization which emphasized 
central control and, for the time, the form rather than the spirit of 
instruction. This was well pointed out by Victor Cousin (R. 
280), in contrasting conditions in Prussia with those existing in 
France. 

Napoleon begins the organization of education. In 1799 Na- 
poleon became First Consul and master of France, and in 1804 
France, by vote, changed from a Republic to an Empire, with 
Napoleon as first Emperor. Until his banishment to Saint He- 
lena (1815) he was master of France. A man of large executive 
capacity and an organizing genius of great ability, whether he 
turned to army organization, governmental organization, the 
codification of the laws, or the organization of education. Napo- 
leon's practical and constructive mind quickly reduced parts to 
their proper places in a well-regulated scheme. Shortly after he 
became Consul he took up, among other things, the matter of 
educational organization. 

His first effort was in 1800, when he transformed the old hu- 
manistic College Louis le Grand (founded 1567) and created four 
military colleges from its endowment. One of these colleges he 
later, in characteristic fashion, transformed into a School of Arts 
and Trades (R. 282). In 1802 he signed 
the famous Concordat with the Pope. 
This restored the priests to the churches, 
with state aid for their stipends, and 
virtually turned over primary education 
again to the Church for care and control. 
The "Brothers of the Christian Schools" 
(p. 515) were recalled the next year and 
especially favored, and soon established 
themselves more firmly than before the 
Revolution. 

In 1802 Napoleon first turned his atten- 
tion to a general organization of public in- 
struction by directing Count de Fourcroy, 
a distinguished chemist who had been a 
teacher in the Polytechnic School, and whom he appointed Di- 
rector of Public Instruction, to draw up, according to his ideas, 
an organizing law on the subject. This became the Law of 1802. 
It was divided into nine chapters, as follows : 




Fig. 175. 

Count de Fourcroy 

(1755-1809) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 591 

I. Degrees of Instruction. VI. The Military School. 

II. Primary Schools. VII. The National Pupils. 

III. Secondary Schools. VIII. The nationales pensions 

IV. Lycees. IX. General regulations. 
V. Special Schools. 

I. Primary schools. The chapter on primary schools virtually 
reenacted the Law of 1795 (R. 258 b). Each commune ^ was re- 
quired to furnish a schoolhouse and a home for the teacher. The 
teacher was to be responsible to local authorities, while the super- 
vision of the school was placed under the prefect of the Depart- 
ment. The instruction was to be limited to reading, writing, and 
arithmetic, and the legal authorities were enjoined " to watch that 
the teachers did not carry their instructions beyond these limits." 
The teacher was to be paid entirely from tuition fees, though one 
fifth of the pupils were to be provided with free schooling. The 
State gave nothing toward the support of the primary schools. 

The interest of Napoleon w^as not in primary or general educa- 
tion, but rather in training pupils for scientific and technical efl^\ 
ciency, and youths of superior ability for the professions and for 
executive work in the kind of government he had imposed upon 
France. To this end secondary and special education were made 
particular functions of the State, while primary education was 
left to the communes to provide as they saw fit. They could pro- 
vide schools and the parents could pay for the teacher, or not, as 
they might decide. There was no compulsion to enforce the re- 
quirement of a primary school, and no state aid to stimulate local 
effort to create one. In consequence not many state primary 
schools were established, and primary education remained, for an- 
other generation, in the hands of private teachers and the Church. 

2. Secondary schools. Chapters iii and iv of the Law of 1802 
made full provision for two types of secondary schools — the 
Communal Colleges and the Lycees ^ — to replace the Central 
Higher Schools established in 1795 (p. 518). These latter had 
lacked sadly in internal organization. They were merely day 
schools, lacking the dormitory and boarding arrangements which 
for over three centuries had characterized the French colleges. As 

^ The commune in France was the smallest unit for local government, and corre- 
sponded to the district, town, or township with us, or with the Church parish under 
the old regime. There were approximately 37,000 communes in France. The 
Department was a much larger unit, France being divided, for administrative pur- 
poses, into 82 Departments, these corresponding to a rather large county. 

^ By this term what is known elsewhere as secondary school must be understood. 
See footnote, page 272, for explanation of the term. 



592 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

a result they had not prospered. The Law of 1802 now replaced 
them with two types of residential secondary schools, in which the 
youth of the country, under careful supervision and discipline, 
might prepare for entrance to the higher special schools. These 
fixed the lines of future French development in secondary schools. 

The standard secondary school now became known as the 
Lycee. These institutions corresponded to the Colleges under the 
old regime, of which the College of Guyenne (R. 136) was a type. 
The instruction was to include the ancient languages, rhetoric, 
logic, ethics, belles-lettres, mathematics, and physical science, 
with some provision for additional instruction in modern lan- 
guages and drawing. Each was to have at least eight "profes- 
sors," an administrative head, a supervisor of studies, and a 
steward to manage the business affairs of the institution. The 
State usually provided the building, often using some former 
church school which had been suppressed, and the cities in which 
the Lycees were located were required to provide them with 
furniture and teaching equipment. The funds for maintenance 
came from tuition fees, boarding and rooming income, and state 
scholarships, of which six thousand four hundred were provided. 

Besides the Lycees, every school established by a municipality, 
or kept by an individual, which gave instruction in Latin, French, 
geography, history, and mathematics was designated as a sec- 
ondary school, or Communal College. These institutions usually 
offered but a partial Lycee course, and were tuition schools, being 
patronized by many parents whose tastes forbade the sending of 
their children to the lower-class primary schools. A license from 
the Government to operate was necessary before masters could be 
employed. They were to be maintained by the municipality, 
without any state encouragement beyond some grants for capable 
teachers and scholarships in the Lycees for meritorious pupils. 

Within two years after the enactment of the Law of 1802 there 
had been created in France 46 Lycees, 378 secondary schools of 
various degrees of completeness, and 361 private schools of sec- 
ondary grade had been opened. A number of these disappeared 
later, in the reorganization of 1808. For the supervision of all 
these institutions the Director General of Public Instruction ap- 
pointed three Superintendents of Secondary Studies; and for the 
work of the schools he outhned the courses of instruction in detail, 
laid down the rules of administration, prepared and selected the 
textbooks, and appointed the "professors." 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 593 

Special or Higher Schools. The chapter of the Law of 1802 
on Special Schools made provision for the creation of the follow- 
ing special "faculties" or schools for higher education for France: 

3 medical schools, to replace the Schools of Health of 1794 (p. 518). 
10 law schools; increased to 12 in 1804 (Date of Code Napoleon, 

p. 518). 

4 schools of natural history, natural philosophy, and chemistry. 
2 schools of mechanical and chemical arts. 

I mathematical school. 

I school of geography, history, and political economy. 

A fourth school of art and design. 

Professors of astronomy for the observatories. 

In 1803 the School of Arts and Trades was added (R. 282), and in 
1804, after Napoleon had signed the Concordat with the Pope, 
thus restoring the Catholic religion (abolished 1791), schools of 
theology were added to the above list. 

We have here, clearly outlined, the main paths along which 
French state educational organization had been tending and was 
in future to follow. The State had definitely dispossessed the 
Church as the controlling agency in education, and had definitely 
taken over the school as an instrument for its own ends. Though 
primary education had been temporarily left to the communes, 
and was soon to be turned over in large part to be handled by the 
Church for a generation longer, the supervision was to remain 
with the State. The middle-class elements were well provided 
for in the new secondary schools, and these were now subject to 
complete supervision by the State. For higher education groups 
of Special Schools, or Teaching Faculties, replaced the older uni- 
versities, which were not re-created until after the coming of the 
Third RepubHc (187 1). The dominant characteristics of the 
state educational system thus created, aside from its emphasis on 
secondary and higher education, were its uniformity and central- 
ized control. These characteristics were further stressed in the 
reorganization of 1808, and have remained prominent in French 
educational organization ever since. 

Creation of the University of France. By 1806 Napoleon was 
ready for a further and more complete organization of the public 
instruction of the State, and to this end the following law was 
now enacted (May 10, 1806): 

Sec. I. There will be formed, under the name of Imperial Univer- 
sity, a body exclusively commissioned with teaching and public educa- 
tion throughout the Empire. 



594 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Sec. 2. The members of this corporation can contract civil, special, 
and temporary obligations. 

Sec. 3. The organization of this corps will be given in the form of a 
law to the legislative body in the session of 1810. 

In 1808, without the formality of further legislation, Napoleon 
issued an Imperial Decree creating the University of France. 
This was not only Napoleon's most remarkable educational crea- 
tion, but it was an administrative and governing organization for 
education so in harmony with French spirit and French govern- 
mental ideas that it has persisted ever since, though changed 
somewhat in form with time. 

The Decree began by declaring that "public instruction, in the 
whole Empire, is confined exclusively to the University," and 
that ''no school, nor establishment for instruction, can be formed 
independent of the Imperial University, and without the author- 
ity of its chief." Unlike the University of Berlin (p. 574), created 
a year later, this was not a teaching university at all, but instead 
a governing, examining, and disbursing corporation,^ presided 
over by a Grand Master and a Council of twenty- six members, all 
appointed by the Emperor. This Council decided all matters of 
importance, and exercised supervision and control over education 
of all kinds, from the lowest to the highest, throughout France.^ 
To assist the Council, general inspectors for medicine, law, the- 
ology, letters, and science were provided for, to visit and "exam- 
ine the condition of instruction and discipline in the faculties, 
lycees, and colleges ; to inform themselves in regard to the fidelity 
and ability of professors, regents, and ushers; to examine the 
students ; and to make a complete survey of those institutions, in 
their whole administration." Beneath the Grand Master and 
Council the State was divided into twenty- seven "Academies" 
(administrative districts), each of which had a Rector, a Council 
of ten, and Inspectors, all appointed by the Grand Master. These 

1 The University had at its disposal approximately 2,500,000 francs a year. This 
was derived from a state grant of 400,000 francs, the income from the property still 
remaining from the old confiscated universities, and the remainder largely from 
examination fees. In 1850 its property was taken over by the State, and the 
University was changed into a state department. 

2 This type of administrative organization is at first not easy for the American 
student to understand. The University of the State of New York — ^^ virtually the 
department of pubHc instruction for the State — is our closest American analogy. 
On the banishment of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy, in 1815, the 
Grand Master and Council were replaced by a Commissioner of Public Instruction, 
with Assistant Commissioners for the different divisions, and in 1820 this was further 
changed into a Royal Council of Public Instruction. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 595 

exercised jurisdiction over teachers and pupils in all schools, and 
decided all local matters, subject to appeal to the Grand Master 
and Council. 

Under this new administrative organization but little change 
was made in the schools from that provided for in the law of 1802. 
Primary education remained as before, private schools and 
Church schools supplying most of the need. All were under the 
supervision of the University, and all were instructed to 

make as a basis of their instruction: (i) the precepts of the Catholic 
religion; (2) fidehty to the Emperor, to the imperial monarchy, the 
depository of the happiness of the people, and to the Napoleonic 
dynasty, the conservator of the unity of France, and of all the ideas 
proclaimed by the Constitution. 

The Lycees and Communal Colleges continued, much as be- 
fore,^ and during the half-century which followed, experienced a 
steady and substantial growth. 

Development of the Lycees 

Year i8og 1811 1813 1829 1847 1866 

Lycees 35 36 36 36 S4 74 

Pupils 9,068 10,926 14,492 15.087 23,207 34,442 < 

Free pupils.. . 4,199 4,008 3,500 1,600 

Development of the Communal Colleges 

Year 1809 1815 1830 1849 1855 1866 

Colleges 273 323 332 306 244 251 

Pupils 18,507 19.320 27,308 31J06 32,500 33,038 

The Special Higher Schools were also continued, and to the list 
given (p. 593) Napoleon added (1808) a Superior Normal School 
(R. 283) to train graduates of the Lycees for teaching. This 
opened in 18 10, with thirty-seven students and a two-year course 
of instruction, and in 181 5 a third year of method and practice 
work was added. With some varying fortunes, this institution 
has continued to the present. 

The new interest in primary education. The period from 181 5 
to 1830 in France is known as the Restoration. Louis XVIII was 
made King and ruled until his death in 1824, and his brother 
Charles X who followed until deposed by the Revolution of 1830. 
Though a representative of the old regime was recalled on the 
abdication of Napoleon, the great social gains of the Revolution 
were retained. There was no odious restoration of privilege and 
absolute monarchy. Frenchmen continued to be equal before 

1 In 1909 a decree restored Greek and Latin to their old place of first importance 
in the Lycees, thus destroying the strong interest in scientific instruction, in so far 
as the higher secondary schools were concerned, which had characterized the 
Revolution, 



596 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the law; a form of constitutional government was provided; the 
right of petition was recognized ; and the system of public instruc- 
tion as Napoleon had organized it continued almost unchanged. 
For a decade at least there was less political reaction in France 
than in other continental States. 

In matters of education, what had been provided was retained, 
and there seems (R. 285) to have been an increasing demand for 
additions and improvements, particularly in the matter of pri- 
mary and middle-class schools, and a willingness on the part of 
the communes to provide such advantages. Some small progress 
had been made in meeting these demands, before 1830. 

In 1816 a small treasury grant (50,000 francs) was made for 
school books, model schools, and deserving teachers in the pri- 
mary schools, and in 1829 this sum was increased to 300,000 
francs. In 1818 the " Brothers of the Christian Schools" were 
permitted to be certificated for teaching on merely presenting their 
Letter of Obedience from the head of their Order, and in 1824 
the cantonal school committees were remodeled so as to give the 
bishops and clergy entire control of all Catholic primary schools. 
Monitorial instruction was introduced from England by private 
teachers, in an effort to supply the beginnings of education at 
small expense, and for a time this had some vogue, but never 
proved very successful. In 181 5 the Lycees were renamed Royal 
Colleges, but in 1848 the old name was restored, and has since 
been retained. In 181 7 there were thirty-six Lycees, receiving an 
annual state subsidy of 812,000 francs; thirty years later the fifty- 
four in existence were receiving 1,500,000 francs. From 1822 to 
1829 the Higher Normal School was suppressed, and twelve ele- 
mentary normal schools were created in its stead. 

Early work under the Monarchy of 1830. In July, 1830, 
Charles X attempted to suppress constitutional liberty, and the 
people rose in revolt and deposed him, and gave the crown to a 
new King, Louis-Philippe. He ruled until deposed by the crea- 
tion of the Second Republic, in 1848. The "Monarchy of 1830" 
was supported by the leading thinkers of the time, prominent 
among whom were Thiers and Guizot, and one of the first affairs 
of State to which they turned their attention was the extension 
downward of the system of public instruction. The first steps 
were an increase of the state grant for primary schools (1830) to a 
million francs a year; the overthrow of the control by the priests 
of the cantonal school committees (1830); the aboHtion (1831) of 




NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 597 

the exemption of the religious orders from the examinations for 
teaching certificates; and the creation (1830-31) of thirty new- 
normal schools. 

The next step was to send (183 1) M. Victor Cousin — Director 
of the restored Higher Normal School of France — on a mission 
to the German States, and in particular to Prussia, to study and 
report on the system of elementary education, teacher training, and 
educational organization and administra- 
tion which had done so much for its regen- 
eration. So convincing was Cousin's Report ^ 
that, despite bitter national antipathies, it 
carried conviction throughout France. 'Tt 
demonstrated to the government and the 
people the immense superiority of all the 
German States, even the most insignificant 
duchy, over any and every Department of 
France, in all that concerned institutions of 
primary and secondary education." Cousin 
pronounced the school law of Prussia (R. 

280) " the most comprehensive and perfect ^, ^'^' IJ 

. ... T • 1 Victor Cousin 

legislative measure regarding primary edu- (i 792-1867) 

cation" with which he was acquainted, 

and declared his conviction that "in the present state of things, a 
law concerning primary education is indispensable in France." 
The chief question, he continued, was "how to procure a good one 
in a country where there is a total absence of all precedents and 
experience in so grave a matter." Cousin then pointed out the 
bases, derived from Prussian experience and French historical de- 
velopment, on which a satisfactory law could be framed (R. 284 
a-c); the desirabihty of local control and liberty in instruction 
(R. 284 f-g); and strongly recommended the organization of 
higher primary schools (a new creation; first recommended (1792) 
by Condorcet, p. 514) as well as primary schools (R. 284 e) to 
meet the educational needs of the middle classes of the population 
of France. 

The Law of 1833. On the basis of Cousin's Report a bill, mak- 
ing the maintenance of primary schools obligatory on every com- 
mune ; providing for higher primary' schools in the towns and cit- 
ies; additional normal schools to train teachers for these schools; a 

1 Report on the Condition of Public Instruction in Germany, and Particularly in 
Prussia. Paris, 1831. Reprinted in London, 1834; New York City, 1835. 



598 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



corps of primary school inspectors, to represent the State; and 
normal training and state certification required to teach in any- 
primary school, was prepared. In an address to the Chamber of 
Deputies, in introducing the bill (1832), M. Guizot,^ the newly 
appointed Minister for Public Instruction, set forth the history of 
primary instruction in France up to 1832 (R. 285 a) ; described the 
two grades of primary instruction to be created (R. 285 b) ; and, 
emphasizing Cousin's maxim that "the schoolmaster makes the 
school," dwelt on the necessity for normal training and state cer- 
tification for all primary teachers (R. 285 c). In preparing the 
bill it was decided not to follow the revolutionary ideas of free 
instruction, by lay and state teachers, or to enforce compulsion 

to attend, and for these omis- 
sions M. Guizot, in his Me- 
moires (R. 286), gives some 
very interesting reasons. 

The bill became a law the 
following year, and is known 
officially as the Law of 1833. 
This Law forms the founda- 
tions upon which the French 
system of national elemen- 
tary education has been de- 
veloped, as the Napoleonic 
Law of 1802 and the Decree 
of 1808 have formed the basis 
for secondary education and 
French state administrative 
organization. A primary 
school was to be established 
in every commune, which was 
to provide the building, pay a 
fixed minimum salary to the 
teacher, and where able main- 
tain the school. The State re- 
served the right to fix the pay 
of the teacher, and even to approve his appointment. A tuition fee 
was to be paid for attendance, but those who could not pay were to 

^ Franfois Pierre Guillaume Guizot was Minister for Public Instruction from 
1832 to 1837, and head of the French government from 1840 to 1848. He was 
throughout his entire poHtical career a conservative, anxious to preserve constitu- 
tional government under a monarchy and stem the tide of republicanism. 




Elementary- 



Secondary 



Fig. 177. Outline of the Main 

Features of the French 

State School System 




Plate 14. Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot (i 787-1874) 
Creator of the French nnmary school system 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 599 

be provided with free places. The primary schools were to give in- 
struction in reading, writing, arithmetic, the weights and meas- 
ures, the French language, and morals and religion. The higher 
primary schools were to build on these subjects, and to offer in- 
struction in geometry and its applications, linear drawing, sur- 
veying, physical science, natural history, history, geography, and 
music, and were to emphasize instruction in "the history and 
geography of France, and in the elements of science, as they apply 
it every day in the office, the workshop, and the field." ^ These 
latter were the Biirgerschulen, recommended by Cousin (R. 284 e) 
on the basis of his study of Prussian education.^ 

The primary schools were to follow a uniform plan, and as 
a guide a Manual of Primary Instruction was issued, giving de- 
tailed directions as to what was to be done. In sending out a 
copy of the Law to the primary teachers of France, M. Guizot en- 
closed a personal letter to each, informing him as to what the 
government expected of him in the new work (R. 287). During 
the four years that M. Guizot remained Minister of Public In- 
struction he rendered a remarkable service, well described by 
Matthew Arnold (R. 288), in awakening his countrymen to the 
new problem of popular education then before them. 

The results under the Law of 1833 were large, ^ and the subse- 
quent legislation under the monarchy of 1830 was important. 
For the first time in French history an earnest effort was made to i 
provide education suited to the needs of the great mass of the peo- 
ple, and the marked development of schools which ensued showed / 
how eagerly they embraced the opportunities offered their chil/ 

1 We see here the beginnings of education in agriculture, in which the French 
were pioneers. 

^ The schools, though, were not very successful, because of social reasons. Par- 
ents who could afford to do so sent their children to the much higher-priced Com- 
munal Colleges or Lycees, where Latin was the main study, in preference to sending 
them to a scientific, modern-type, middle-class school, as conferring a better social 
distinction on both pupils and parents. 

* By 1838 there were 14,873 public schools the property of the communes; by 
1847 there were 23,761; and by 1851 but 2500 out of approximately 37,000 com- 
munes were without schools. There were also over six thousand religious schools 
by 1850. By 1834 the number of boys in the communal schools was 1,656,828, and 
a decade later over two millions. The thirteen normal schools of 1830 had grown to 
seventy-six by 1838, with over 2500 young men then in training for teaching. In 
1836 the Law of 1833 was extended to include, where possible, schools for girls as 
well, and the creation of a new set of normal schools to train schoolmistresses wa= 
begun. By 1848 over three and a half millions of children, of both sexes, were re- 
ceiving instruction in the primary schools. In 1835 primary inspectors, those 
"sinews of public instruction," as Guizot termed them, were estabhshed, one for 
every Department, by royal decree. By 1847 there were two inspectors-general, 
and 13 inspectors and sub-inspectors at work in France. 



6oo HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Development of Infant Schools 

Year 1827 1837 1840 1843 1846 1850 1863 1886 1897 

Schools.. I 251 555 1489 1861 173s 3308 6696 5683 

dren, though the schooHng was neither compulsory nor gratui- 
tous. In 1837 Infant Schools, for still younger children, were au- 
thorized, and in 1840 state aid for these was begun. In 1836 
classes for adults, first begun in Paris in 1820, were authorized 
generally, but it was not until 1867 that these were formally in- 
corporated into the state school system. In 1845 state aid for the 
Communal Colleges, as well as for the Lycees, was begun. 

Reaction after 1848. In France, as in Europe generally, the 
people were steadily becoming more liberal, as they became better 
educated, while the rulers were becoming more autocratic. The 
result was the series of revolutions of 1848, which broke out first 
in France, and finally extended to most of the countries of conti- 
nental Europe. In France the King, Louis-Philippe, was forced 
to abdicate; a Republic, based on universal manhood suffrage, 
was proclaimed; and Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon I, 
was elected President. In 1851 Napoleon established himself as 
Dictator; prepared a new constitution providing for an Empire; 
and, in 1852, dissolved the Second Republic and assumed the 
title of Emperor Napoleon III. This Second Empire lasted until 
1870, when France was humiliated by the Prussians as the latter 
had been by Napoleon I in 1806. The Emperor and his armies 
were taken prisoners (1870) and, in 187 1, the Prussians occupied 
Paris and crowned the new Emperor of united and Imperial Ger- 
many in the palace of the French Kings at Versailles. A Third 
Republic now succeeded, and this has lasted to the present time. 

The period from 1848 to 1870 in France was a period of middle- 
class rule, and reaction in education as in government. In 1848 
a Sub-Commission on Primary Education reported in opposition 
to the state primary schools. The troubles of 1848 had brought 
to view the political restlessness which had taken possession of the 
teachers, as well as other classes in society. The new schools were 
naturally suspected of being the source of the popular discontent. 
Many teachers had sympathized with, and some had taken part 
in the disturbances, and teachers generally were now placed under 
close surveillance. Some of the leaders were forced into exile un- 
til after 1870. Religious schools, regarded as more favorable to 
monarchical needs and purposes, were now encouraged, and the 
number of religious schools increased from 6464 in 1850, to 11,391 



L' 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE 6oi 

by 1864. Private schools, too, were given full freedom to com- 
pete with the state schools, and the pa}^ of the primary teachers 
was reduced. The course in the normal schools was condemned 
as too ambitious, and, in 185 1, was cut down. The course of in- 
struction in the primary schools, on the other hand, was, unlike in 
Prussia, broadened instead of restricted, and in particular empha- 
sis was placed, in keeping with nearly a century of French tradi- 
tion, on scientific and practical subjects.^ The law of 1850 stated 
the requirements for primary schools as follows : 

Art. 23. Primary instruction comprises moral and religious instruc- 
tion, reading, writing, the elements of the French language, computa- 
tion, and the legal system of weights and measures. It may comprise, 
in addition, arithmetic appHed to practical operations, the elements of 
history (a required subject after 1867) and geography, notions of the 
physical sciences and of natural history applicable to the ordinary pur- 
poses of life, elementary instruction in agriculture, trade, and hygiene; 
and surveying, leveling, linear drawing, singing, and gymnastics. 

Religious instruction prospered under the Second Empire, and 
the state primary schools lost in importance. The Lycees con- 
tinued largely as classical institutions, though after 1865 the 
crowding of the rising sciences began to dispute the supremacy of 
classical studies. There were, however, many voices of discon- 
tent, particularly from exiled teachers (R. 289) , and the way was 
rapidly being prepared for the creation of a stronger and better 
state school system as soon as poHtical conditions were propitious. 

Revolutionary ideals at last realized. With the creation of the 
Third Republic, in 1870, a change from the old conditions and old 
attitudes took place. Up to about 1879 the new government was 
in the control of those who were at heart sympathetic with the 
old conditions, but were forced to accept the new; from 1879 to 
1890 was a transition period; and since 1890 the RepubHc has 
grown steadily in strength and regained its position among the 
great powers of the world. The first few years of the new Repub- 
lic were devoted to paying the Prussian indemnity and clearing 
the soil of France of German armies, but, after about 1875, edu- 
cation became a great national interest among the leaders of 
France.^ France saw, somewhat as did Prussia after 1806, the 

^ This was in large part due to manufacturing and business needs, as France was 
rapidly forging ahead during the period as a manufacturing and commercial nation. 

^ Prominent among these, perhaps most prominent, was Jules Ferry, Mayor of 
Paris during the trying period of 1870-71, then member of the French legislature, 
and Minister of Public Instruction in a number of cabinets between 1879 and 1885. 
Drawing his inspiration from Condorcet's Plati of Education (p. 514; R- ^r6) and 



602 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Progress of Primary Education in 
France, during the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, AS SHOWN BY THE REDUCTION 

IN THE Percentage of Illiteracy 
AMONG Army Conscripts, and among 
Persons signing the Marriage Rec- 
ords 



Marriage records 



' Years 



Army 
conscripts 



Men 



Women 



1790 
1827 
1833 
1840 
184s 
1850 
I8SS 
i860 
i86s 
1870 
187s 
1880 
188s 
1890 
1896 
1901 



0% 



S3 0% 



necessity for creating a strong state system of primary, secondary, 
and higher schools to train the youth of the land in the principles 
of the Republic, strengthen the national spirit, advance the wel- 
fare of the State, and protect 
it from dangers both within 
and without. 

Millions were put into the 
building of schoolhouses (1878- 
88); new normal schools were 
established; a normal school 
for women was created in each 
of the eighty-seven depart- 
ments of France; the academic 
and superior councils of public 
instruction were reorganized to 
eliminate clerical influences 
(1881); religious instruction 
was replaced by moral and civic 
instruction (R. 290) ; and cleri- 
cal "Letters of Obedience" 
were no longer accepted, and all 
teachers were required to be 
certificated by the State. The Law of 1881, eliminating instruc- 
tion in religion from the elementary schools, was followed, in 
1886, by a law providing for the gradual replacement of clerical 
by lay teachers. In 1904, the teaching congregations of France 
were suppressed. All elementary education now became public, 
free, compulsory, and secular,^ and teachers were required to be 
neutral in religious matters.^ 

Edgar Quinet's Instruction of the People (R. 289), he brought about the enactment 
of a series of reform school laws commonly known as the "Ferry Laws." These 
provided for free, compulsory, elementary education, to be given by laymen; sec- 
ondary education for girls; the extension of normal schools; and enlarged aid by 
the State in the building up of popular education. 

1 "The non-sectarian school is not the work of a few advanced thinkers imposed 
upon a docile country. They would not have been able to create anything enduring 
if the French conscience had not been ready to follow them. This is what the 
adversaries of our schools do not wish to understand, cannot understand, or are 
anxious to conceal from those whom they direct. Certainly they have the right to 

2 "To each man his proper sphere; to the minister of religion the liberty of 
preaching the doctrine of the different churches, to teachers who teach in the name 
of the State, that is, of society, the right of limiting themselves to the field of univer- 
sal human morals, together with the duty of refraining from any attack on religious 
beliefs. Neutrality is guaranteed by the secularization of the teaching body, and 
it must be strictly observed." (Compayre, Gabriel.) 



73 0% 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ITALY 603 

Since 187 1, also, technical and scientific education has been 
emphasized; the primary and superior-primary schools have been 
made free (1881) and compulsory (1882); classes for adults have 
been begun generally; the state aid for schools has been very 
greatly increased; lycees and colleges for women have been created 
(1880); the lycees modernized in their instruction;^ and the re- 
organization and reestabhshment of a series of fifteen state uni- 
versities of a modern type, begun in 1885, was completed in 1896. 
The reorganization and expansion of education in France since 
1875 is a wonderful example of republican interest and energy, 
and is along entirely different lines from those followed, since the 
same date, in German lands. 

After the lapse of nearly a century we now see the French 
Revolutionary ideas of gratuity, obligation, and secularization 
finally put into effect, and the state system of public instruction 
outlined by Condorcet (p. 514), in 1792, at last an accomplished 
fact. 

II. NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ITALY 

Importance of the work of Napoleon. So much has been writ- 
ten about the deluge of blood that took place in Paris in the days 
of the Commune and the time of the National Conventions, and of 
the military victories and autocratic rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, 
that it is difficult to appraise the importance of either, from the 
point of view of the progress of civilization and of the organiza- 
tion of modern political institutions, at its true worth. The faults 

attempt a reaction according to their own preferences. They have no right to 
believe, nor even to allow it to be beheved, that the creation of the non-sectarian 
school was the coup de force of an audacious minority. The non-sectarian school 
has come because the nation wished it. The program of moral instruction, long 
prophesied, conceived, and hoped for, was in the traditions of France as she marched 
forward toward her republican aspirations. This program is not only the conscious 
effort of the men who gave the school a new mission — that of laying the foundation 
of social peace through elementary instruction; it is the expression of the republican 
conscience of 1882." (Moulet, Alfred, D'une education morale democratique.) 

1 "The most striking feature is that, in place of the one single and uniform course 
for all pupils, several are provided for their selection. Here is obvious the influence 
of the elective courses common in the United States, whose existence and success 
were reported on to the Minister of Public Instruction by the Commission to the 
World Exposition at Chicago, in 1893. The courses last seven years. The school 
period is divided into two cycles, first one of four years, and then one of three. In 
the first cycle, the pupils have a choice of two sections, one emphasizing the ancient 
and modern languages, the other the modern languages and science. In the second 
cycle there are four sections, viz., Graeco-Latin; Latin-modem languages; Latin- 
scientific; and scientific-modern languages." (Compayre, Gabriel, Education in 
France.) 



6o4 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



of both are prominent and outstanding, but it nevertheless was 
the merit of the Revolution that it enabled France, and along 
with France a good portion of western Europe, to rid itself of the 
worst survivals of the Middle Ages, while to Napoleon much of 
western Europe is indebted for the foundation of its civil institu- 



Longitude West 10° from 0: 
r~^ France in 1799 
KHfa^-il French additions under Naool 
Slates dependent on Napol 




Fig. 178. Europe in i8io 
Showing the control of France when Napoleon was at the height of his power 

tions, unified legal procedure, beginnings of state educational 
organization, and modern governmental forms. Writing on this 
subject, Matthew Arnold ^ well said : 

With all his faults, his [Napoleon's] reason was so clear and strong 
that he saw, in its general outhnes at least, the just and rational type 
of civil organization which modern society needs, and wherever his 
armies went he instituted it. 



^ Arnold, Matthew, Schools and Universities on the Continent, p. 115, (London, 
1868.) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ITALY 605 

That the French Revolution's merit and service was a real one is 
shown by all the world, as it improves, getting rid more and more of 
the Middle Ages. That Napoleon's merit and service was a real one is 
shown by the bad governments which succeeded him having always 
got rid, when they could, of his work, and by the progress of improve- 
ment, when these governments became intolerable, and are themselves 
got rid of, always bringing it back. Where governments were not 
wholly bad, and did not get rid of Napoleon's good work, this work 
turns out to have the future on its side, and to be more likely to assim- 
ilate the institutions round it to its pattern than to be itself assimilated 
by them. 

In the Italian States, the Netherlands, some of the French can- 
tons of Switzerland, the Rhine countries, and the Danish penin- 
sula, in particular, the rule of Napoleon, imposed by his armies, 
carried out by rulers of his selection, and maintained for a long 
enough period that the legal organization, civil order, unified gov- 
ernment, and taste of educational opportunities of a new type 
which his rule brought became attractive to the people, in time 
proved deeply influential in their political development. ^ All 
these nations still show traces of the French influence in their 
state educational organization. We shall take the Italian States 
as a type, and examine briefly the influence on the development 
of state educational organization there which resulted from con- 
tact with the forward-looking rule of "The Great Emperor." 

Decline in importance of education in Italy. In a preceding 
chapter (p. 503), we mentioned that the rule of Napoleon in 
northern Italy awakened the national spirit from its long leth- 
argy, and caused Italian liberals to look forward, for the first time 
since the days of the Revival of Learning, to the time when the 
Italian States might be united into one Italian nation, with Rome 
as its capital. This became the work of the mid-nineteenth cen- 
tury (see dates, Fig. 179), though not fully completed until the 
World War of 19 14-18. Italy stands to-day a great united na- 
tion, with a large future ahead of it, but as such it is entirely a 
nineteenth-century creation. From the time of its intellectual 
decline following the Renaissance, to the middle of the nineteenth 
century, Italy remained "sl geographical expression" and split up 
into a number of little independent States; up to the time of Napo- 
leon it was a part of the German-ruled "Holy Roman Empire." 

^ For example, by the Peace of Luneville (1801), by which Napoleon took from 
the Germans all territory west of the Rhine and consohdated it, he extinguished 118 
free cities, principahties, and petty states. In addition, he extinguished the sepa- 
rate existence of 160 others east of the Rhine. The importance of such consolida- 
tions for the future of Germany has been large. 



6o6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

After the great patriotic effort of the period of the Revival of 
Learning (p. 264) in Italy, and the rather feeble and unsuccessful 
attempts at a reform of religion which followed, the intellectual 
development of Italy was checked and turned aside for centuries 
by the triumph of an improgressive and anti-intellectual atti- 
tude on the part of the dominant Church. The persecution of 
Galileo (p. 388) was but a phase of the reaction in religion which 
had by that time set in. Education was turned over to the re- 
ligious orders, such as the Jesuits and the Barnabites, and in- 
struction was turned aside from liberal culture and the promo- 
tion of learning to the support of a religion and the stamping out 
of heresy. Though a number of educational foundations were 
made, and some important undertakings begun after the days 
when her universities were crowded and Florence and Venice 
vied with one another for the intellectual supremacy of the west- 
ern world, the spirit nevertheless was gone, and both education 
and government settled down to a tenacious preservation of the 
existing order. Scholars ceased to frequent the schools of Italy; 
the universities changed from seats of learning to degree-confer- 
ring institutions; ^ the intellectual capitals came to be found north 
of the Alps; and the history of educational progress ceased to be 
traced in this ancient land. In the early part of the eighteenth 
century the schools there reached perhaps their lowest intellectual 
level. 

The beginnings of reform in Savoy. The first and almost the 
only attempt to change this condition, before Napoleon's armies 
went crashing through the valley of the Po, was made in the eight- 
eenth century by two Dukes of Savoy. By decrees of 1729 
and 1772 they took the control of the secondary (Latin) schools in 
their little duchy from the religious orders, and established a 
Council of Public Instruction to reform the university examina- 
tions, see that teachers were prepared for the Latin schools, and 
take over in the name of the authorities of the duchy the control 
of education. Though inspired by a political interest, the two 
dukes brought into their little kingdom the much-needed ideas of 
honest work, effective administration, and public spirit, and laid 
the foundations for the control of education by the public au- 
thorities later on. The only other attempt to improve conditions 

^ Bologna, for example, had 166 professors in the early seventeenth century, but 
by 1737 it had but 62. The universities came chiefly to be places where young men 
obtained degrees but not learning. At Naples a noble family by the name of Avel- 
lino came to have the power of virtually selling degrees in law and medicine. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ITALY 607 

came in Lombardy, in 1774, which then was a part of the Austrian 
dominions and felt the short-Hved reforms of Maria Theresa (p, 
562 ; R. 276) . Elsewhere in Italy conditions remained unchanged 
until the time of Napoleon. 

Napoleon revives the national spirit. In 1796 Napoleon's ar- 
mies invaded Sardinia, Lombardy, and the valley of the Po, and he 
soon extended his control to almost all the Italian peninsula. For 
nearly two decades thereafter this collection of little States felt 
the unifying, regenerating influence of the organizing French. 
Monasteries and convents and religious schools were transformed 
into modern teaching institutions, brigandage v/as put down, and 
efficient and honest government v,^as established. The ideas of 
the French Law of 1802 as to education were applied. Every 
town was ordered to estabUsh a school for boys, to teach the read- 
ing and writing of Italian and the elements of French and Latin: 
the secondary schools were modernized; and the universities 
were completely reorganized. Some of the universities were re- 
duced to licei {lycees; secondary schools), while others were 
strengthened and their revenues turned to better purposes. The 
universities at Naples and Turin in particular were transformed 
into strong institutions, with a decided emphasis on scientific 
studies. A normal school was founded at Pisa, on the model of 
the one at Paris. New standards in education were set up, the 
study of the sciences was introduced into the secondary schools, 
and the study of medicine and law was regenerated. 

With the fall of Napoleon his work was largely undone. The 
firm, just, and intelligent government which he had given Italy — 
something the land had not known for ages — came to an end. 
The little States were "handed back to the reactionary dynasts 
whose rule was neither benevolent nor intelligent, while the ever- 
ready Austrian army crushed out any local movement for liberal 
institutions." The laws regarding education were repealed, and 
the schools the French had established were closed as revolution- 
ary and dangerous. The normal school at Pisa ceased to exist; 
the university at Naples was dismantled; the one at Turin was 
closed; and the Jesuits were allowed to return and reorganize in- 
struction. The result was that a common discontent with ensu- 
ing conditions made Italians conscious of their racial and histori- 
cal unity, and this finally expressed itself in the revolutions of 
1848. These failed at the time, and the heel of the Austrian op- 
pressor came down harder than before. Liberty of the press 



6o8 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



practically ceased. The national leaders went into exile for 
safety. The prisons were filled with political offenders. The 
schools were closed or ceased to influence. The Pope, fearing the 



.- - '«";» ■.■'■■^1/ -•-''' -L",\'-csJi- 
;> '1 P.-OtV-— -^AL-.v. ,.'1^!., •• jLsi 




10' Loceltude Eaat 12 ° from G 



Fig. 179. The Unification of Italy, since 1848 

end of his earthly kingship approaching, united firmly with the 
Austrians to resist liberal movements. Finally, under the leader- 
ship of the enlightened King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel (1849- 
78) and his Prime Minister, Count of Cavour, the Austrians were 
driven out (1859-66) and all Italy was united (1870) under the 
rule of one king interested in promoting the welfare of his people. 
Sardinia leads to national organization and control. The 
movement to free Italy was essentially a liberal movement. Many 
hoped to create a republic, but chose a liberal constitutional mon- 
archy under Victor Emmanuel as the most feasible plan. Cavour 
understood the importance of public instruction, and from the 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ITALY 609 




Fig. 180 

Count of Cavour 

(1810-61) 



first began to build up schools ^ and put them under state control. 
In 1844, a normal school was opened in Turin. In 1847, ^ Minis- 
ter of Public Instruction was appointed and a Council of Public 
Instruction created, after the plan of 
France. In 1848, a General School Law 
was enacted, and the organization and 
improvement of schools was begun mth 
a will. In 1850, a commission was sent 
to study the school systems of Europe, 
and in particular those of France and of 
the German States. A Supreme Council 
of Public Instruction was now formed for 
Sardinia, and the process of creating 
primary schools, higher-primary schools, 
classical and technical secondary schools, 
colleges, and the reorganization of the 
universities was begun. In 1859, when 
the growth of Italian unity was rapidly 
extending the rule of Victor Emmanuel,- a new law, providing 
a still better state organization of public instruction, was 
enacted. A Minister of Public Instruction appointed by the 
King, a Supreme Council of Public Instruction, and a Depart- 
ment of Public Instruction as a branch of the government, were 
all provided for, after the French plan. 

This Law of 1859 was later extended to cover all Italy, and has 
formed the basis for all subsequent legislation. It clearly estab- 
hshed a state system of education, though the religious schools 
were allowed to remain. It also established control after the 
French plan, with a high degree of centralization and uniformity. 
The schools established, too, were much after the French type, 
though much less extensive in scope. The primary and superior- 
primar>^ at first were but two years each, though since extended in 
all the larger communities to a six-year combined course. The 
two-class school system was established, as in France and German 
lands. The secondary- school system consisted of a five-year 
ginnasio, established in many places (218 in Italy by 1865; 458 by 

1 Not only were schools built up, biit commerce, roads, and in particular scientific 
agriculture were subjects of deep interest to Cavour. He saw, very clearly, that if 
Sardinia was to be the nucleus of a future Italy, Sardinia must show unmistakably 
her worthiness to lead. 

' By 1859 Sardinia had come to include Savoy and Lombardy, and was the 
largest State in northern Italy. A year later all but Venetia and the States of the 
Church bad been added. 



6io 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



>o 



o 









^£ 



g 3 



■ Point 

9 






1 91 6) with a three-year liceo following, but found in a smaller 
number of places. Parallel with this a seven-year non-classical 
scientific and technical secondary school was also created, and 
these institutions have made marked headway (461 by 191 6) in 

central and northern 
Italy. Pupils may pass 
to either of these on the 
completion of the ordi- 
nary four-year primary 
course, at the age of 
ten. Above the second- 
ary schools are numer- 
ous universities. The 
normal-school system 
created prepared for 
teaching in the primary 
schools, while the uni- 
versity system followed 
the completion of the 
liceo course. 

The influence of 
French ideas in Italian 
educational organiza- 
tion is clearly evident. 
Before the French ar- 
mies brought French 
governmental ideas and organization to Italy almost nothing 
had been done. Then, during the first six decades of the nine- 
teenth century, the transition from the church-school idea to 
the conception of education as an important function of the State 
was made, and the resulting system is largely French in organiza- 
tion and form. , 

Subsequent progress. From this point on educational progress 
has been chiefly a problem of increased finances and the slow but 
gradual extension of educational opportunities to more and more 
of the children of the people. The church schools have been al- 
lowed to continue side by side with the state schools, and the 
problem of securing satisfactory working relations has not always 
been easy of solution. 
In 1877 primary education ^ was ordered made compulsory, 

^ The Law of 1877 fixed the instruction in the primary schools, for the three corn- 



Elementary 
Schools 



Secondary 
Schools 



Fig. 181. Outline of the Main Features 
OF THE Italian State School System 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ITALY 6il 

and religious instruction was dropped from the state schools, but 
the slow progress of the nation in extending Kteracy indicates that 
but little had been accomplished in enforcing the compulsion pre- 
vious to the new compulsory law of 1904. This made more strin- 
gent provisions regarding schooling, and provided for three thou- 
sand evening and Sunday schools for illiterate adults. In 1906, an 
earnest effort was begun to extend educational advantages in the 
southern provinces, where illiteracy has always been highest. In 
191 1, the state aid for elementary education was materially in- 
creased. In 191 2, a new and more modern plan of studies for the 
secondary schools was promulgated. Since 191 2 many important 
advances have been inaugurated, such as elementary schools of 
agriculture, vocational schools, continuation schools, the middle- 
class industrial and commercial schools. The World War di- 
rected new attention to the educational needs of the nation. Italy, 
at last thoroughly awakened, seems destined to be a great world 
power poHtically and commercially, and we may look forward to 
seeing education used by the Italian State as a great constructive 
force for the advancement of its national interests. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Show how the Revolution marked out the lines of future educational 
evolution for France. 

2. Explain why France and Italy evolved a school system so much more 
centrahzed than did other European nations. 

3. Explain Napoleon's lack of interest in primary education, in view of 
the needs of France in his day. 

4. Show that Napoleon was right, time and circumstances considered, in 
placing the state emphasis on the types of education he favored. 

5. Explain why middle-class education should have received such special 
attention in Cousin's Report, and in the Law of 1833. 

6. ^yas the course of instruction provided for the primary schools in 1833, 
times and needs considered, a liberal one, or otherwise? Why? 

7. Compare the 1833 and the 1850 courses. 

8. Explain why all forms of education in France should have experienced 
such a marked expansion and development after 1875. 

9. Explain why great military disasters, for the past 150 years, have nearly 
always resulted in national educational reorganization. 

10. Appraise the work and the permanent influence of Napoleon. 

11. Explain Napoleon's interest in establishing schools and universities, 
when the Austrian and Church authorities were so interested in abolish- 
ing what he had created. 

12. What did the dropping of religious instruction from the primary schools 
of both France and Italy, both strong Catholic countries, indicate as to 
national development? 



pulsory years, as reading, writing, the Italian language, elements of civics, arith- 
metic, and the metric system. The omission of religious instruction excited much 
opposition from church authorities, but without effect. 



6i2 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are re- 
produced: 

282. Le Brun: Founding of the School of Arts and Trades. 

283. Jourdain: Refounding of the Superior Normal School. 

284. Cousin: Recommendations for Education in France. 

285. Guizot: Address on the Law of 1833. 

286. Guizot: Principles underlying the Law of 1833. 

287. Guizot: Letter to the Primary Teachers of France. 

288. Arnold: Guizot's Work as Minister of Pubhc Instruction. 

289. Quinet: A Lay School for a Lay Society. 

290. Ferry: Moral and Civic Instruction replaces the Religious. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Just what attitude toward education did the action of Napoleon in 
changing the character of the school at Compiegne (282) express? 

2. What type of school (283) was the re-created Superior Normal? 

3. Just what did Victor Cousin recommend (284) as to (o) schools to be 
created; {b) control and administration; {c) compulsory attendance; 
{d) schools for the middle classes; and {c) education and control of 
teachers? 

4. Was Guizot's Law of 1833 (285) in harmony with the recommendations 
of Cousin (284)? 

5. Why have public opinion and legislative action, in France and elsewhere, 
so completely reversed the positions taken by Guizot and his advisers 
(286) in framing the Law of 1833? 

6. From Guizot's letter to the teachers of France (287), and Arnold's 
description of his work (288), just what do you infer to have been the 
nature of his interest in advancing primary education in France? 

7. Contrast the reasoning of Guizot (286) and Quinet (289) on lay instruc- 
tion. Of the reasoning of the two men, which is now accepted in France 
and the United States? 

8. Contrast the letters of Guizot (287) and Ferry (290) to the primar' 
teachers of France. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Arnold, Matthew. Popular Education in France. 
*Arnold, Matthew. Schools and Universities on the Continent. 
*Barnard, Henry. National Education in Europe. 

Barnard, Henry. American Journal of Education, vol. xx. 

Compayre, G. History of Pedagogy, chapter xxi. 
*Farrington, Fr. E. The Public Primary School System of France. 
*Farrington, Fr. E. French Secondary Schools. 

Guizot, F. P. G. Memoires, Extracts from, covering work as Minister 
of Public Instruction, 1832-37, in Barnard's American Journal of 
Education, vol. xi, pp. 254-81, 357-99. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN 

ENGLAND 

I. THE CHARITABLE-VOLUNTARY BEGINNINGS 

English progress a slow but peaceful evolution. The begin- 
nings of national educational organization in England were 
neither so simple nor so easy as in the other lands we have de- 
scribed. So far this was in part due to the long-established idea, 
on the part of the small ruling class, that education was no busi- 
ness of the State; in part to the deeply ingrained conception as to 
the religious purpose of all instruction ; in part to the fact that the 
controlling upper classes had for long been in possession of an 
educational system which rendered satisfactory service in prepar- 
ing leaders for both Church and State; and in part — probably 
in large part — to the fact that national evolution in England, 
since the time of the Civil War (1642-49) has been a slow and 
peaceful growth, though accompanied by much hard thinking and 
vigorous parliamentary fighting. Since the Reformation (1534- 
39) and the Puritan uprising led by Cromwell (1642-49), no civil 
strife has convulsed the land, destroyed old institutions, and 
forced rapid changes in old established practices. Neither has 
the country been in danger from foreign invasion since that mem- 
orable week in July, 1588, when Drake destroyed the Spanish 
Armada and made the future of England as a world power 
secure. 

EngHsh educational evolution has in consequence been slow, 
and changes and progress have come only in response to much 
pressure, and usually as a reluctant concession to avoid more seri- 
ous trouble. A strong English characteristic has been the ability 
to argue rather than fight out questions of national policy; to ex- 
hibit marked tolerance of the opinions cf others during the dis- 
cussion; and finally to recognize enough of the proponents' point 
of view to be wilHng to make concessions sufficient to arrive at 
an agreement. This has resulted in a slow but a peaceful evo- 
lution, and this slow and peaceful evolution has for long been 
the dominant characteristic of the political, social, and educa- 
tional progress of the English people. The whole history of 



614 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the two centuries of evolution toward a national system of edu- 
cation is a splendid illustration of this essentially English char- 
acteristic. 

Eighteenth-century educational efforts. England, it will be 
remembered (chapter xix, § iii) , had early made marked progress 
in both political and religious liberty. Ahead of any other people 
we find there the beginnings of democratic liberty, popular en- 
lightenment, freedom of the press, religious toleration,^ social re- 
form, and scientific and industrial progress. All these influences 
awakened in England, earlier than in any other European nation, 
a rather general desire to be able to read (R. 170), and by the 
opening of the eighteenth century we find the beginnings of a char- 
itable and philanthropic movement on the part of the churches 
and the upper classes to extend a knowledge of the elements of 
learning to the poorer classes of the population. 

As a result, as we have seen (chapter xviii), the eighteenth 
century in England, educationally, was characterized by a new 
attitude toward the educational problem and a marked extension 
of educational opportunity. Even before the beginning of the 
century the courts had taken a new attitude toward church con- 
trol of teaching,^ and in 1700 had freed the teacher of the ele- 
mentary school from control by the bishops through license. '"^ In 
1 7 14 an Act of Parliament (^13 Anne, c. 7) exempted elementar}'' 
schools from the penalties of conformity legislation, and they 
were thereafter free to multiply and their teachers to teach.* The 
dame school (R. 235) now became an established English institu- 
tion (p. 447). Private-adventure schools of a number of types 
arose (p. 451). The churches here and there began to provide 
elementary parish-schools for the children of their poorer mem- 

1 Prussia and Holland possibly form exceptions in the matter. Frederick the 
Great (p. 474) was noted for his liberality in religious matters. There different 
varieties of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were all tolerated, and there they 
mingled and intermarried. So well were the Jews received that the type — 
German- Jew — is to-day familiar to the world. 

2 As early as 1670, in the celebrated Bates case, the English court held that a 
teacher could not be dispossessed from his school for teaching without the Bishop's 
license, if he were the nominee of the founder or patron. This led (p. 438) to a 
great increase in endowed schools. 

^ In the Cox case (1700), another important legal decision, the Enghsh court held 
that there was not and never had been any ecclesiastical control over any schools 
other than grammar schools, and that teachers in elementary schools did not need 
to have a license from the Bishop. The year following, in the case of Rex v. Douse, 
the same principle was affirmed in even clearer language. 

* It was not until 1779 that an Act (19 Geo. Ill, c. 44) granted full freedom to 
Dissenters to teach. In 1791 a supplemental Act (31 Geo. Ill, c. 32, s. 13-14) 
granted similar liberty to Roman Catholics. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 615 

bers (p. 449), or training-schools for other children who were to go 
out to service (R. 241). Workhouse schools and "schools of in- 
dustry" also were used to provide for orphans and the children of 
paupers (p. 453). 

The Charity-School system. Most important of all was the 
organization, by groups of individuals (R. 237) and by Societies 
(S.P.C.K.; p. 449) formed for the purpose, and maintained by 
subscription (R. 240), collections (R. 291), and foundation in- 
comes, of an extensive and well-organized system of Charity- 
Schools (p. 449). The "Society for the Promotion of Christian 
Knowledge" dates from the year 1699, and the "Society for the 
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" from 1701. The 
first worked at home, and the second in the overseas colonies.^ 
Both did much to provide schools for poor boys and girls, furnish- 
ing them with clothing and instruction (R. 292), and training 
them in reading, writing, spelhng, counting, cleanliness, proper 
behavior, sewing and knitting (girls), and in "the Rules and 
Principles of the Christian Religion as professed and taught in 
the Church of England ' ' (R. 238 b) . The Charity-School idea was 
in a sense an application of the joint-stock-company principle to 
the organization and maintenance of an extensive system of 
schools for the education of the children of the poor, the stock be- 
ing subscribed for by humanitarian-minded people. The upper 
classes had for long been well provided, through tutors in the 
home and grammar schools and colleges, with those means for 
education which have for centuries produced an able succession of 
gentlemen, statesmen, governors, and scholars for England, and 
many of the commercial middle-class had, by the eighteenth cen- 
tury, become able to purchase similar advantages for their sons. 
These now united to provide, as part of a great organized charity 
and under carefully selected teachers (R. 238 a), for the more 
promising children of their poorer neighbors, the elements of that 
education which they themselves had enjoyed. 

The movement spread rapidly over England (p. 451), and soon 
developed into a great national effort to raise the level of intelli- 
gence of the masses of the EngHsh people. Thousands of persons 
gave their services as directors, organizers, and teachers. Trav- 
eling superintendents were employed. A rudimentary form of 
teacher-training was begun. The preaching of a Charity Sermon 

' It was this second Society that did notable work in the AngHcan Colonies of 
America, and particulariy in and about New York City (p. 369). See Kenxp, W. W., 
Support oj Schools in Colonial New York by the S.P.G. (New York, 1915.) 



6i6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

each year/ with a special collection, became a general Englislh 
practice. 

The Voluntary System. The rise of the Methodist move- 
ment," after 1730 (p. 489); the earthquake shocks of 1750; the 
rise of the popular novel and newspaper; the printing of poHtical 
news, and cheap scientific pamphlets (p. 492) ; and the growing 
tendency to debate questions and to apply reason to their solu- 
tion — all tended to give emphasis in England to these eight- 
eenth-century charitable means for extending education to the 
children of those who could not afford to pay for it. Unlike the 
German States, where the State and the Church and the school 
had all worked together from the days of the Reformation on, 
the English had never known such a conception. The efforts, 
though, of the educated few, in the eighteenth and early nine- 
teenth centuries, to extend the elements of learning, order, piety, 
cleanliness, and proper behavior to the children of the masses, 
formed an important substitute for the action by the Church- 
State which was so characteristic a feature of Teutonic lands. 

We see in these eighteenth-century efforts the origin of what 
became known in England as "the voluntary system," and upon 
this -v'oluntary support of education — private, parochial, charit- 
able — the English people for long rehed. Of action by the State 
there was none during the eighteenth century, aside from an Act of 
1767 (7 Geo. Ill, c. 39) relating to the education of pauper children. 
This estabUshed the important principle — unfortunately not 
followed up — of providing that poor parish children of London 
might be maintained and educated "at the cost of the rates." 

The Sunday-School movement. One other voluntary eight- 
eenth-century movement of importance in the history of English 
educational development should be mentioned here, as it formed 
the cormecting link between the parochial-charity-school move- 

^ Begun, in 1704, in London, these were continued yearly there until 1877. They 
were also preached for more than a century in many other places. To these sermons 
the children marched in procession, wearing their uniforms, and a collection for the 
support of the schools was taken. Of the first of these occasions in London, Strype, 
in his edition of Stow, says : " It was a wondrous surprising, as well as a pleasing sight, 
that happened June the 8th, 1704, when all the boys and girls maintained at these 
schools, in their habits, walked two and two, with their Masters and Mistresses, 
some from Westminster, and some through London; with many of the Parish min- 
isters going before them; and all meeting at Saint Andrews', Holburn, Church, 
where a seasonable sermon was preached . . . upon Genesis xviii, 19, 1 know him that 
he will command his children, etc., the children (about 2000) being placed in the gal- 
leries." 

^ "The religious revival under Wesley owed, perhaps, more than is generally 
suspected to the Christian teaching in these new and humble elementary schools." 
GVIontmorency, J. E. G. de, The Progress of Education in England, p. 54.) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 617 

ment of the eighteenth century and the philanthropic period of 
the educational reformers of the early nineteenth. This was the 
Sunday-School movement, first tried by John Wesley in Savan- 
nah, in 1737, but not introduced into England until 1763. The 
idea amounted to Uttle, though, until practically worked out anew 
(1780) by Robert Raikes, a printer of Gloucester, and described 
by him (1783) in his Gloucester Journal (R. 293), after he had ex- 
perimented with it for three years. "^ His printed description of 
the Sunday-School idea gave a national impulse to the move- 
ment, and Sunday Schools were soon estabhshed all over England 
to take children off the streets on Sunday and provide them with 
some form of secular and religious instruction.^ 

The movement coincided with new religious, social, and eco- 
nomic forces which were at work, and which awakened an interest 
not only in the education of the children of the poorer working- 
classes, but caused the upper and middle classes in society to feel^ 
a new sense of responsibility for social and educational reform. 
The cold and unemotional reHgion of the EngHsh Church in the 
early eighteenth century had created an indifference to the simple 
truths and duties of the Gospels. The great religious revival un- 
der Wesley and Whitefield had challenged such an attitude, and 
had done much to infuse a new spirit into religion and awaken a 
new sense of responsibility for social welfare. The rapid growth 
of population in the towns, following the beginnings of factory 
life (p. 493), had created new social and economic problems, and 
the neglect of children in the manufacturing towns had shocked 
many thinking persons. The w^ay in which parents and children, 
freed from hard labor in the factories on Sundays, abandoned 
themselves to vice, drunkenness, and profanity caused many, 
among them Raikes himself (R. 293), to inquire if "something 
could not be done " to turn into respectable men and women " the 
little heathen of the neighborhood." The Sunday School was his 
answer, and the answer of many all over England.^ 

1 He gathered together the children (90 at first) employed in the pin factories of 
Gloucester, and paid four women a shilling each to spend their Sundays in instruct- 
ing these poor children "in reading and the Church Catechism." 

- Sunday being a day of rest and the mills and factories closed, the children ran 
the streets and spent the day in mischief and vice. In the agricultural districts of 
England farmers were forced to take special precautions on Sundays to protect their 
places and crops from the depredations of juvenile offenders. 

' "In a very special way they met the sentiment of the times. They were cheap 
— many were conducted by purely voluntary teachers — they did not teach too 
much, and they had the further merit of not interfering with the work of the week." 
(Birchenough, C, History 0/ Elementary Education in England and Wales, p. 40,) 



6i8 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



In 1785 "The Society for the Support and Encouragement of 
Sunday Schools in the different Counties of England" was formed 
with a view to establishing a Sunday School in every parish in the 
kingdom, and the Queen headed a subscription list, following a 
general appeal for funds. By 1787 it was estimated that 234,000 
children in England and Wales were attending a Sunday School, 
and by 1792 the number had increased to half a million. The 
Parliamentary return for 18 18 showed 5463 Sunday Schools in 
existence, and 477,225 scholars; in 1835 the returns showed 1,548,- 
890 scholars, half of whom attended no other school, and approxi- 
mately 160,000 voluntary teachers.^ In Manchester, then a city 
scourged with almost universal child-labor, 
the schools (1834) were in session five and 
a half hours on Sunday and two evenings a 
week. The moral and religious influence of 
these schools was important, and the instruc- 
tion in reading and writing, meager as it was, 
filled a real need of the time. 

Other voluntary schools; ** Ragged 
Schools.** The Charity Schools and the 
Sunday Schools were the two most conspic- 
uous of the voluntary-organization type of 
undertakings for providing the poor children 
of England with the elements of secular and 
religious education. Many other organiza- 
tions of an educational and charitable na- 
ture, aided also by many individual efforts, 
too numerous to m.ention, were formed with 
the same charitable and humanitarian end 
in view. Others, similar in type, charged 
a small fee, and hence were of the priv- 
ate-adventure type. Sunday Schools, day 
schools, evening schools, children's churches, 
bands of hope, clothing clubs, messenger bri- 
gades, shoeblack brigades, orphans' schools, reformatory schools, 
industrial schools, ragged schools — these were some of the types 
that arose. Only one of these — "Ragged Schools" — will be 
described. 

^ In a Manchester Sunday School, in 1834, there were 2700 scholars and 120 un- 
salaried teachers, all but two or three of whom were former pupils in the Sunday 
Schools, now teaching others, free of charge, in return for the advantages once given 
them. 




Fig. 182. a Ragged- 
School Pupil 
(From a photograph of 
a boy on entering the 
school; later changed 
into a respectable trades- 
man. From Guthrie) 




Plate 15. John Pounds's Ragged School at Portsmouth 




Plate 16. An English Village Voluntary School 

(Reproduced from an early nineteenth-century engraving, through the 
courtesy of WiUiam G. Bruce) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 619 

The originator of the "Ragged Schools" — schools for the edu- 
cation of destitute children, waifs and strays not reached by other 
agencies — was a iarge-hearted cobbler of Portsmouth, by the 
name of John Pounds (i 766-1839), who divided his time between 
cobbling and rescue work among the poorest and most degraded 
children of his neighborhood. His school is shown in the picture 
facing this page. (Plate 15.) In his shoeshop he taught such chil- 
dren, free of charge, to read, write, count, cook their food, and 
mend their shoes. He was a schoolmaster, doctor, nurse, and play- 
fellow to them all in one. His workshop was a room of only six by 
eighteen feet, yet in it he often had forty children under his in- 
struction. His work set an example, and "Ragged Schools," or 
"Schools for the Destitute," began to be formed in many places 
by humanitarians. These took the form of day schools, night 
schools, Sunday Schools, and the so-called industrial schools (R. 
294). The instruction in most of them was entirely free,^ but 
some charged a small fee, in a few cases as high as a shilling a 
month. It was one of these schools that Crabbe described when 
he wrote : ^ 

Poor Reuben Dixon has the noisiest school 

Of ragged lads, who ever bowed to rule; 

Low in his price — the men who heave our coals, 

And clean our causeways, send him boys in shoals. 

To see poor Reuben, with his fry beside — 

Their half-check'd rudeness and his half-scorned pride — 

Their room, the sty in which th' assembly meet, 

In the close lane behind the Northgate street ; 

T' observe his vain attempts to keep the peace, 

Till tolls the bell, and strife and trouble cease, 

Calls for our praise; his labours praise deserves, 

But not our pity; Reuben has no nerves. 

'Mid noise and dirt, and stench, and play, and prate, 

He calmly cuts the pen or views the slate. 

In 1844 "The Ragged School Union" was formed in London, 
and maintained there many of the types of schools mentioned 
above. The "Constitution and Rules of the Association for the 
Establishment of Ragged Industrial Schools for Destitute Chil- 
dren in Edinburgh" (R. 294) gives a good idea as to the nature, 

1 "The amount of instruction rarely, if ever, exceeds the first four rules of arith- 
metic, with reading and writing. The class of children instructed is presumed to be 
of the very poorest, living in the most crowded districts. No doubt a large number 
come under this designation, but not a few better- to-do persons are found ready to 
take advantage for their children of the free instruction thus held out to them, and 
even at times almost pressed upon them." (Bartley, George C. T., The Schools for 
the People, p. 385.) 

* The Reverend George Crabbe (1754-1832). "The schools of the Borough." 



620 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

support, and instruction in such schools. As late as 1870, when 
national education was first begun in England, there were about 
two hundred of these Ragged Schools in London alone, with about 
23,000 children in them. Upon many such forms of irregular 
schools England depended before the days of national organization. 

Other eighteenth-century influences. During the latter half of 
the eighteenth century French Revolutionary thought ^ and 
American political action began to exert some influence on public 
opinion in England. The small upper ruling class, alarmed at the 
developments in France, became confirmed in its opposition to 
any general popular education aside from a Httle reading, writing, 
counting, and careful reUgious training, while on the other hand 
men of more liberal outlook felt that popular enlightenment was a 
necessity to prevent the masses from becoming stirred by inflam- 
matory writings and speeches. The increasing distress in the 
agricultural regions, due to the rapid change of England from an 
agricultural to a manufacturing nation; the crowding of great 
numbers of working people into the manufacturing towns; and 
the social misery and political unrest following the Napoleonic 
wars all alike contributed to a feeling of need for any form of phil- 
anthropic effort that gave promise of alleviating the ills of society. 
There now grew up a small but influential body of thinkers who 
favored the maintenance of a system of general and compulsory 
education by the State, and the separation of the school from the 
Church. The most notable proponents of this new theory were 
Adam Smith, the Reverend T. R. Malthus, and the Anglo-Ameri- 
can Thomas Paine. The first approached the question from an 
economic point of view, the second from an economic and bio- 
logic, and the third from the political. 

In 1776 Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations appeared. This was 
one of the great books of all time. Among other matters he dealt 
with the question of education. He pointed out that English so- 
ciety was now becoming highly organized; that the new manu- 
facturing Hfe had completely changed the simple conditions of an 
earlier agricultural society; that in the narrow round of manufac- 

1 French Revolutionary thought " represented an attack on over-interference, 
vested interests, superstition, and tyranny of every form. It showed a marked 
propensity to ignore history, and to judge everj'thing by its immediate reasonable- 
ness. It pictured a society free from all laws and coercion, freed from all clerical 
influence and ruled by benevolence, a society in which all men had equal rights and 
were able to attain the fullest self-realization. In its strictly educational aspects, 
it demanded the withdrawal of education from the Church and the setting up of a 
state system of secular instruction." (Birchenough, C, History of Elementary 
Education in England and Wales, p. 20.) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 621 




turing duties and town life people tended to lose their inventive- 
ness and to stagnate; and that the individual degeneracy which 
set in in a more highly organized t\^e of 
society became a social danger of large 
magnitude. Hence, he argued (R. 295), 
it was a matter of state interest that "the 
inferior ranks of the people" be instructed 
to make them socially useful and to render 
them" less apt to be misled into any wanton 
or unnecessary opposition to measures of 
government." Accordingly, he held, the 
State had every right, not only to take 
over elementary education as a state func- 
tion and a pubHc charge, but also to make 
it free and compulsory. 

In 1798 the Reverend T. R. Malthus's 
Essay on Population appeared. This was 
a precursor of the work of Darwin, and another of the great books 
of all time. He pointed out that population everywhere tended 
to outrun the means of subsistence, and that it was only prevented 
from doing so by preventive checks which involved much misery 
and vice and pauperism. To prevent 
pauperism each individual must exercise 
moral restraint and foresight, and to en- 
able all to do this a widespread system of 
public instruction was a necessity (R. 296). 
The money England had spent in poor- 
rehef he regarded as largely wasted, be- 
cause it afforded no cure. In the general 
education of a people the real solution lay. 
He said: 



rr 

Fig. 183. Adam Smith 
(1723-90) 




We have lavished immense sums on the 
poor, which we have every reason to think 
have constantly tended to aggravate their 
misery, ... It is surely a great national dis- 
grace that the education of the lowest classes in 
England should be left to a few Simday Schools, 
supported by a subscription from individuals, who can give to the course 
of instruction in them any kind of bias which they may please. (R 296.) 



Fig. i{ 
Rev. T. R. Malthus 
(i 766-1834) 



Agreeing thoroughly with Adam Smith that a general diffusion of 
knowledge was a safeguard to society, he urged the teaching of the 



622 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

elements of political economy in the common schools to enable 
people to live better in the new type of competitive society.^ 

In 1791-92 Thomas Paine published his widely read Rights of 
Man. He expressed the French Revolutionary pohtical theory, 
holding that government, while capable of great good were its 
powers only properly exercised, was, as organized, an evil. In a 
well-governed nation none would be permitted to go unin- 
structed, he held, and he would cut off poor-relief and make a 
state grant of £4 a year for every child under fourteen for its edu- 
cation, and would compel parents to send all children to school 
to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. 

Each of these three books had a long and a slowly cumulative 
influence, and a small number of young and powerful champions 
of the idea of popular education as a public charge began, early in 
the nineteenth century, to urge action and to influence public 
opinion. 

II. THE PERIOD OF PHILANTHROPIC EFFORT (1800-33) 

Conditions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This 

second period in the history of the organization of English educa- 
tion begins with the publication, in 1797, of Dr. Andrew Bell's An 
Experimenl in Education, describing his work in educating large 
numbers of children by means of the so-called mutual system, at 
the Male Asylum at Madras, India. The period properly ends 
with the first Parhamentary grant for education, in 1833. In its 
main characteristics it belongs to the eighteenth rather than to 
the nineteenth century, as the prominent educational movements 
of the eighteenth (charity-schools, Sunday Schools, schools of in- 
dustry) continue strong throughout the period, and many new 
undertakings of a similar charitable nature ("Ragged Schools"; 
associations for the improvement of the condition of the poor, etc.) 
were begun. 

The period — during and after the Napoleonic wars — was one 
of marked social and pohtical unrest, and of corresponding em- 
phasis on social and philanthropic service. The masses were dis- 
contented with their lot, and were beginning to be with their lack 

1 The ideas of Malthus were especially offensive to his brother clergymen, and 
created quite a furor. Many regarded him as an insane and unorthodox fanatic. 
A prevailing idea of the time was that of a "beautiful order Providentially arranged," 
and it was the custom to give everything a rose-colored hue. The poor were thought 
to be contented in their poverty, and the rich and the aristocratic considered them- 
selves divinely appointed to rule over them. Malthus saw the fallacy of such 
thinking, and stated matters in the light of biologic and political truths. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 623 

of political privileges. Numerous plans to quiet the unrest and 
improve conditions were proposed, of which schemes to increase 
employment (industrial schools; evening schools), to encourage 
thrift (savings banks; children's brigades), and to spread an ele- 
mentary and religious education (mutual schools; infant schools) 
that would train the poor in self-help were the most prominent. 
"The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the 
Comforts of the Poor," founded in 1796, became a very important 
early-nineteenth-century institution. Branches were established 
all over England. Soup-kitchens, clothing-stations, savings 
banks, and schools were among the chief lines of activity. In 
particular it extended and improved Sunday Schools, encouraged 
the formation of charity-schools and schools of industry, and later 
gave much aid in establishing the new monitorial schools. Edu- 
cational interest steadily strengthened during the period, though 
as yet along lines that were deemed relatively harmless, were in- 
expensive, and were largely religious in character. 

The eighteenth-century conception of education as a charity, 
designed where given to train the poor to "an honest, upright, 
grateful, and industrious poverty," still prevailed; there was as 
yet little thought of education as designed to train the poor to 
think for and help themselves. The eighteenth-century concep- 
tion of the educational process, too, which regarded education as 
something external and determined by adult standards and 
needs, and to be imposed on the child from without, also contin- 
ued. The purpose of the school was to manufacture the standard 
man, and the business of the teacher was to so organize and meth- 
odize instruction that the necessary knowledge could be acquired 
as economically, from a financial point of view, as possible. The 
Pestalozzian conception of education as a development of the in- 
dividual, according to the law of his own nature, found but slow 
acceptance in England. Mental development, scientific instruc- 
tion, the habit of thinking, the exercise of judgment, and free and 
enlightened opinion were ideas that found Httle favor there, and 
hence had to be handled carefully by those who had caught the 
new conception of the educational process. 

In the political reaction following the end of Napoleon's rule 
the upper and ruling classes of England, in common with those of 
continental lands, became exceedingly suspicious of much educa- 
tion for the masses. To secure contributions for schools it be- 
came necessary " to avow and plead how little it was that the 



024 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



schools pretended or presumed to teach." ^ England now experi- 
enced a great development of manufacturing and commerce, a 
great material prosperity ensued, and the growing demand for 
education was met by a counter-demand that the education pro- 
vided should be systematized, economical, and should not teach 
too much. Such a system of training was now discovered and ap- 
plied, in the form of mutual or monitorial instruction, and was 
hailed as "a. new expedient, parallel and rival to the modern in- 
ventions in the mechanical departments." 

Origin of mutual or monitorial instruction. In 1797 Dr. An- 
drew Bell, a clergyman in the EstabUshed Church, published the 





Rev. Andrew Bell (1753-1832) Joseph Lancaster (,1778-1838) 
Fig. 185. The Creators of the Monitorial System 

results of his experiment in the use of monitors in India.^ The 
idea attracted attention, and the plan was successfully introduced 
into a number of charity-schools. About the same time (1798) a 
young Quaker schoolmaster, Joseph Lancaster by name, was led 
independently to a similar discovery of the advantages of using, 
monitors, by reason of his needing assistance in his school and be- 
ing too poor to pay for additional teachers. In 1803 he pub- 
lished an account of his plan.^ The two plans were quite similar, 

' Foster, John, An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance, p. 259. 

- Bell, Reverend Dr. Andrew, An Experiment in Education made at the Male 
Asylum at Madras, Suggesting a System by which a School or a Family may teach 
itself under the Superintendence of the Master or Parent. London, 1797. 

' Lancaster, Joseph, Improvements in Edtication as it Respects the Industrial 
Classes of the Community. London, 1803; New York, 1807. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 625 

attracted attention from the first, and schools formed after one or 
the other of the plans were soon organized all over England. 

Increased attention was attracted to the new plans by a bitter 
church quarrel which broke out as to who was the real originator 
of the idea/ Bell being upheld by Church-of-England supporters, 
and Lancaster by the Dissenters. In 1808 "The Royal Lancas- 
trian Institution" was formed, which in 1814 became "The Brit- 
ish and Foreign School Society," to promote Lancastrian schools. 
This society had the close support of King George III, the V/higs, 
and the Edinburgh Review, while such liberals as Brougham, 
Whi thread, and James Mill were on its board of directors. This 
Society sent out Lancaster to expound his "truly British" sys- 
tem, and by 18 10 as many as ninety-five Lancastrian schools had 
been established in England. His model school in Borough Road, 
Southwark, which became a training-school for teachers, is shown 
on the following page. Lancaster was a poor manager; became 
involved in financial difficulties; and in 18 18 left for the United 
States, where he spent the remainder of his life in organizing such 
schools and expounding his system. For a time this attracted 
wide attention, as we shall point out in the following chapter. 

Lancaster's work stimulated the Church of England into activ- 
ity, and in 181 1 "The National Society for Promoting the Educa- 
tion of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church 
throughout England and Wales" was formed by prominent 
S.P.C.K. (p. 449) members and Churchmen, with the Archbishop 
of Canterbury as president. This Society was supported by the 
Tories, the Established Church, and the Quarterly Review, and 
was formed to promote the Bell system,- "which made religious 
instruction an essential and necessary part of the plan." Within 
a month £15,000 had been subscribed to establish schools. 
Among many other contributions were £500 each from the uni- 
versities of Oxford and Cambridge. A training-school for teach- 
ers was organized; district societies were formed over England to 
estabhsh schools; and a system of organized aid was extended for 
both buildings and maintenance. By 1831 there were 900,412 

^ Both Bell and Lancaster worked with great energy to organize schools after 
their respective plans, and quarreled with equal energy as to who originated tiie 
idea. While both probably did, the idea nevertheless is older than either. In 1790 
Chevalier Paulet organized a monitorial school in Paris; while the Enghsh school- 
master, John Brinsley (1587-1665), in his Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar Schooles 
(161 2), laid down the monitorial principle in explicit language. 

^ This Society adopted, as a fundamental principle,, "that the national religion 
should be made the foundation of national education, and according to the excellent 
Fiturgy and catechism adopted by our Church for that purpose." 



626 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 







children receiving instruction in the monitorial schools of the 
National Society alone. 

The mutual -instruction idea spread to other lands — France, 
Belgium, Holland, Denmark — and seems to have been tried 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 627 

even in German lands. In France and Belgium it was experi- 
mented with for a time because of its cheapness, but was soon 
discarded because of its defects. In Teutonic lands, where the 
much better Pestalozzian ideas had become established, the 
monitorial system made practically no headway. It was in the 
United States, of all countries outside of England, that the idea 
met with most ready acceptance. 

The system of mutual or monitorial instruction. The great 
merit, aside from being cheap, of the mutual or monitorial system 
of instruction lay in that it represented a marked advance in 
school organization over the older individual method of instruc- 
tion, with its accompanying waste of time and schoolroom dis- 
order. Under the individual method only a small number of 
pupils could be placed under the control of one teacher, and the 
expense for such instruction made general education almost pro- 
hibitive. Pestalozzi, to be sure, had worked out in Switzerland 
the modern class-system of instruction, and following develop- 
mental lines in teaching, but of this the EngUsh were not only 
ignorant, but it called for a degree of pedagogical skill which their 
teachers did not then possess. Bell and Lancaster now evolved 
a plan whereby one teacher, assisted by a number of the brighter 




Fig. 187. Monitors xEAcmNO Reading at "Stations" 

Three "drafts" of ten each, with their toes to the semicircles painted on 
the floor, are being taught by monitors from lessons suspended on the wall. 

pupils whom they designated as monitors, could teach from two 
hundred to a thousand pupils in one school (R. 297). The pic- 
ture of Lancaster's London school (Figure 186) shows 365 pupils 
seated.^ The pupils were sorted into rows, and to each row was 

^ "When Lancaster had his famous interview with King George III, that mon- 
arch was impressed, as he naturally might be, by the statement that one master 
'could teach five hundred children at the same time.' 'Good,' said the King; 
'Good,* echoed a number of wealthy subscribers to Lancaster's projects." (Binns, 
H. B., A Century of Education, p. 299.) 



628 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



assigned a clever boy (monitor) to act as an assistant teacher. 
A common number for each monitor to look after was ten. The 
teacher first taught these monitors a lesson from a printed card, 
and then each monitor took his row to a "station" about the wall 
and proceeded to teach the other boys what he had just learned. 
At first used only for teaching reading and the Catechism, the plan 
was soon extended to the teaching of writing, arithmetic, and 
spelling, and later on to instruction in higher branches. The sys- 
tem was very popular from about 1810 to 1830, but by 1840 its 
popularity had waned. 

Such schools were naturally highly organized, the organization 
being largely mechanical (R. 298). Lancaster, in particular, was 




Fig. 188. Proper Monitorial-School Positions 

(.From an engraved plate of 30 positions, in a Manual of the British 
and Foreign School Society, London, 1831) 

an organizing genius. The Manuals of Instruction gave complete 
directions for the organization and management of monitorial 
schools, the details of recitation work, use of apparatus, order, 
position of pupils at their work, and classification being minutely 
laid down. By carefully studying and following these directions 
any reasonably intelligent person could soon learn to become a 
successful teacher in a monitorial school. 

The schools, mechanical as they now seem, marked a great im- 
provement over the individual method upon which schoolmasters 
for centuries had wasted so much of their own and their pupils' 
time. In place of earlier idleness, inattention, and disorder, Bell 
and Lancaster introduced activity, emulation, order, and a kind 
of military discipline which was of much value to the type of 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 629 

children attending these schools. Lancaster's biographer, Sal- 
mon, has written of the system that so thoroughly was the instruc- 
tion worked out that the teacher had only to organize, oversee, 
reward, punish, and inspire: 

When a child was admitted a monitor assigned him his class; while 
he remained, a monitor taught him (with nine other pupils) ; when he 
was absent, one monitor ascertained the fact, and another found out 
the reason; a monitor examined him periodically, and, when he made 
progress, a monitor promoted him; a monitor ruled the writing paper; 
a monitor had charge of slates and books; and a monitor-general looked 
after all the other monitors. Every monitor wore a leather ticket, 
gilded and lettered, " Monitor of the First Class," " Reading Monitor 
of the Second Class," etc. 

Value of the system in awakening interest. The monitorial 
system of instruction, coming at the time it did, exerted a very 
important influence in awakening interest in and a sentiment for 
schools. It increased the number of people who possessed the 
elements of an education; made schools much more talked about; 
and aroused thought and provoked discussion on the question of 
education. It did much toward making people see the advan- 
tages of a certain amount of schooling, and be willing to contrib- 
ute to its support. Under the plans previously in use education 
had been a slow and an expensive process, because it had to be 
carried on by the individual method of instruction, and in quite 
small groups. Under this new plan it was now possible for one 
teacher to instruct 300, 400, 500, or more pupils in a single room, 
and to do it with much better results in both learning and disci- 
phne than the old type of schoohnaster had achieved. 

All at once, comparatively, a new system had been introduced 
which not only improved and popularized, but tremendously 
cheapened education.^ Lancaster, in his Improvements in Educa- 
tion, gave the annual cost of schooling under his system as only 
seven shillings sixpence ($1.80) per pupil, and this was later de- 
creased to four shilhngs fivepence ($1.06) as the school was in- 
creased to accommodate a thousand pupils. Under the Bell sys- 
tem the yearly cost per pupil, in a school of five hundred, was only 
four shillings twopence ($1.00), in 18 14. In the United States, 

^ In 1807 Mr. Whitbread, an ardent supporter of schools, said, in an address 
before the House of Commons: " I cannot help noticing that this is a period particu- 
larly favorable for the institution of a national system of education, because within 
a few years the^-e has been discovered a plan for the instruction of youth which is 
now brought to a state of great perfection, happily combining rules by which the 
object of learning must be infallibly attained with expedition and cheapness, and 
holding out the fairest prospect of utility to mankind." 



630 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Lancastrian schools cost from $1.22 per pupil in New York, in 
1822, up to $3.00 and $4.00 later on. At first begun as free 
schools/ the expansion of effort was more rapid than the income 
from contributions, and a small tuition fee was in time charged. 
Pupils were admitted at about the age of seven, and might remain 
until thirteen or fourteen, though an attendance of two years was 
considered "abundantly sufficient for any boy." To prepare 
skilled masters and mistresses for the schools — girls were pro- 
vided for in many places — training or model schools were organ- 
ized by both the national societies, and these represent the begin- 
nings of normal- school training in England. 

Infant Schools. Another type of school which became of much 
importance in England, and spread to other lands, was the Infant 
School. This owed its origin to Robert 
Owen, proprietor of the cotton mills at 
New Lanark, Scotland. Being of a phil- 
anthropic turn of mind, and believing that 
man was entirely the product of circum- 
stance and environment, he held that it 
was not possible to begin too early in im- 
planting right habits and forming char- 
acter. Poverty and crime, he believed, 
were results of errors in the various sys- 
tems of education and government. So 
plastic was child nature, that society would 
be able to mould itself "into the very 
image of rational wishes and desires." 
That "the infants of any one class in the 
world may be readily formed into men of any other class," was 
a fundamental behef of his. 

, When he took charge of the mills at New Lanark (1799) he 
found the usual wretched social conditions of the time. Children 
of five, six, and seven years were bound out to the factory as 
apprentices (R. 242) for a period of nine years. They worked as 
apprentices and helpers in the factories twelve to thirteen hours 
a day, and at early manhood were turned free to Join the ignorant 
mass of the population. Owen sought to remedy this condition. 

^ When Lancaster first hired the large hall in Borough Road which later became 
an important training-college, and opened it as a mutual-instruction school, he 
announced: "All that will may send their children, and have them educated freely, 
and those who do not wish to have education for nothing, may pay for it if they 
please." 




Fig. 11 
Robert Owen 
(1771-1858) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 631 

He accordingly opened schools which children might enter at 
three years of age, receiving them into the schools almost as sooA 
as they were able to walk, and caring for them while their parents\ 
were at work. Children under ten he forbade to work in the mills, \ 
and for these he provided schools. The instruction for the chil- 
dren younger than six was to be "whatever might be supposed 
useful that they could understand," and much was made of sing- 
ing, dancing, and play. Moral instruction was made a prominent 
feature. By 1814 his work and his schools had become famous. 
In 181 7 he published a plan for the organization of such industrial 
communities as he conducted. In 1818 he visited Switzerland, 
and saw Pestalozzi and Fellenberg. 

In 1818 a number of Liberals — Brougham, James Mill, and 
others — • combined to establish an Infant School in London, im- 
porting a teacher from New Lanark. The idea took root, was 
popularized, and the Infant School was soon adopted as an inte- 
gral part of their schools by both the British and Foreign School 
Society (Lancastrians) and the National Society (Bell). In 
1836 the " Home and Colonial Infant School Society " was formed 
to train teachers for and to establish Infant Schools. One of 
the organizers of this society was Charles Mayo who had 
worked with Pestalozzi at Yverdon (R. 270), and through his in- 
fluence much of the bookishness which had crept in was removed 
and the better Pestalozzian procedure put in its place. 

Unlike the monitorial schools, the Infant Schools were based 
on the idea of small-group work, and were usually conducted in 
harmony with the new psychological conceptions of instruction 
which had been worked out by Pestalozzi, and had by that time 
begun to be introduced into England. The Infant-School idea 
came at an opportune time, as the defects of the mechanical Lan- 
castrian instruction were becoming evident and its popularity 
was waning. It gave a new and a somewhat deeper philosophical 
interpretation of the educational process, created a stronger de- 
mand than had before been known for trained teachers, estab- 
lished a preference for women teachers for primary work, and 
tended to give a new dignity to teaching and school work by 
revealing something of a psychological basis for the instruction 
of httle children. It also contributed its share toward awakening 
a sentiment for national action. 

Work of the educational societies. The work of the voluntary 
and philanthropic educational societies in establishing schools and 



632 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



providing teachers and instruction before the days of national 
schools was enormous.^ Though the State did nothing before 
1833, and little before 1870, the work of the educational societies 
was large and important. What was done by the church societies 
alone may be seen from the following table: 

Statistics as to 10,595 Elementary Schools founded by the Religious 
Societies (British Census Returns, 185 i) 



Date 


Total num- 
ber of 
schools 


The 

National 
Society, or 
Church 0/ 
England, 

schools 


British 
and For- 
eign 
Schools 
Society 


Indepen- 
dents, or 
Congrega- 
tionalists 


Wesleyan 
Method- 
ists 


Roman 

Catholics 


Baptists 


Other 

religious 

bodies 


Before 1801 
1801-1811 
1811-1821 
1821-1831 
1831-1841 
1841-1851 

Not stated 


766 
410 

879 
1,021 
2,417 
4,604 

498 


709 
350 
756 
897 
2,002 
3>448 
409 


16 
28 
77 
45 
191 

449 
46 


8 

9 
12 
21 

95 
269 

17 


7 

4 

17 

17 

62 

239 
17 


10 
10 
14 
28 
69 
166 
14 


131 


331 


Totals 


10-595 


8,571 


852 


431 


363 


311 


131 


331 



After about 1820-25 the rising interest in elementary education 
expressed itself in the formation of a number of additional socie- 
ties, the more important of which were: 

1824. "London Infant School Society" founded by Brougham. 
1826. "Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge" founded by 

Brougham. The Journal of Education begun. 
1836. "Central Society of Education" founded. 

1836. " Home and Colonial Infant Society " founded. Beginning of a 
Pestalozzian Training College. 

1837. "Educational Committee of the Wesleyan Conference estab- 
lished." 

1843. "Congregational Board of Education" formed. 

1844. "Ragged School Union " founded. 

1845. "Catholic Institute." 

1 In 1820, Brougham, in introducing his "Bill for the Better Education of the 
Poor in England and Wales," gave statistics as to the progress of education at that 
time in England. His estimate as to the numbers being educated were: 

430,000 in endowed and privately managed schools; 

220,000 in monitorial schools; 
50,000 being educated at home; 

100,000 educated only in Sunday Schools; 
53,000 being educated in dame schools. 
From these figures he argued that one in fifteen of the population of England and 
one in twenty in Wales were attending some form of school, but with only one in 
twenty-four in London. The usual period of school attendance for the poorer 
classes was only one and a half to two years. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 633 

1847. The "Catholic Poor-School Committee." 

1847. "Lancashire Public School Association" formed. 

1850. The "National Public School Association." 

1867. "Birmingham Education Aid Society." 

1868. The Manchester Conference. 

1869. Formation of "The League." 

Some of these were formed to found and support schools, and some 
engaged primarily in the work of propaganda in an effort to 
secure some national action. 

III. THE STRUGGLE FOR NATIONAL EDUCATION 

The parliamentary struggle. During the whole of the eight- 
eenth century Parliament had enacted no legislation relating to 
elementary education, aside from the one Act of 1767 for the 
education of pauper children in London, and the freeing of ele- 
mentary schools, Dissenters, and Catholics, from inhibitions as 
to teaching. In the nineteenth century this attitude was to be 
changed, though slowly, and after three quarters of a century of 
struggle the beginnings of national education were finally to be 
made for England, as they had by then tor every other great 
nation. In 1870 the " no-business-of-the-State " attitude toward 
the education of the people, which had persisted from the days of 
the great Elizabeth, was finally and permanently changed. The 
legislative battle began with the first Factory Act ^ of 1802, Whit- 
bread's Parochial Schools BilP of 1807, and Brougham's first 
Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry of 1816 (R. 291); it finally 
culminated with the reform of the old endowed Grammar Schools 
by the Act of 1869, the enactment of the Elementary Education 
Act of 1870 (R. 304), and the Act of 1871 freeing instruction 
in the universities from religious restrictions (R. 305). The first 
of these enactments declared clearly the right of the State to 
inquire into, reorganize, and redirect the age-old educational 
foundations for secondary education; the second made the 
definite though tardy beginnings of a national system of elemen- 
tary education for England ; and the third opened up a university 

^ Known as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act. It limited the working 
hours of apprentices to twelve; forbade night work; required day instruction to be 
provided in reading, writing, and arithmetic; required church attendance once a 
month; and provided for the registration and inspection of factories. The Act was 
veiy laxly enforced, and its chief value lay in the precedent of state interference 
which it established. 

^ Whitbread proposed a national system of rate-aided schools to provide all chil- 
dren in England with two years of free schooling, between the ages of seven and 
fourteen. 



634 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

career to the whole nation. The agitation and conflict of ideas 
was long drawn out, and need not be traced in detail. The fol- 
lowing tabulated summary will give the main outlines of the 
struggle, and the selection on "The Educational Traditions of 
England " (R. 306) gives a good brief history of the long conflict. 

The Parliamentary Struggle for National Education in England 



Dates 



Proposals, Reports, etc., and Results 



1802 
1807 
1816 



1818 
1820 

1833 

1834 

1835 
1837 

1838 
1839 

1841 
1843 
1843 



1847 
1850 



First Factory Act for regulating employment of children. 

Adopted. 
Whitbread's Parochial Schools' Bill introduced. 

Rejected by the House of Lords. 
Broughman secured a Parliamentary Committee to inquire into the state 
of education of the lower classes in London, Westminster, and South- 
wark. 

Report — 130,000 children without school accommodations [1818]. 
(R. 291.) 
Brougham secured a Committee of Inquiry on Educational Charities. 

No report until 1837. 
Bill introduced proposing a tax for schools and the granting of Government 
- aid in building schoolhouses. 

Opposed by Dissenters and Catholics. Withdrawn. Brougham's 
first Educational Bill. 
Government aid for building schoolhouses re-proposed. 

£20,000 a year granted. (R. 299.) Distributed through the two great 
Educational Societies. 
Committee of Inquiry appointed. 

No result beyond statistics. 
Brougham introduced bills to organize a system of elementary education. 
Bills failed of passage. Educational Inquiry Committee appointed 
[1837]. 

Committee report: the deplorable conditions existing. 

Bill of 1839. Education Department created. 
Bill to increase the Government grant to £30,000 and to allow all Societies 
to share. Inspectors to be appointed. Committee of Privy Council on 
Education established. 

Bitter opposition. Carried. Much discussion as to "undenomina' 
tional education." 
Annual grant to establish schools of design in manufacturing districts. 

Voted. 
Sir Jas. Graham's Factory Bill. 

Opposed by the Dissenters and defeated. 
Address to the Crown on condition of the working classes. 

No parliamentary action. 
Yearly grant extended to the maintenance of schools. 

Gradual increase in the yearly grants. 
Minute and Regulations on annual grants and pupil teachers. Founda- 
tion of a system laid. 

Pupil-teacher system definitely established. Certificates to teach. 
Annual grant extended to maintenance. 
Government proposals for nationalizing education. 

Carried, despite violent religious opposition. 
Fox's Bill to make education free and compulsory. 
Defeated. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 635 

The Parliamentary Struggle for National Education in England 

{cont limed) 



Dates 



Proposals, Reports, etc., and Results 



1853 
1853 

i8S5 
1856 

1858 

1861 
1864 
1866 
1867 



1870 
1871 



The Government proposed a small local rate in aid of schools. 

Bill dropped after the first reading. 
Department of Science and Art created, and National Art Training Schocli. 
established. 

Promotion of elementary education in art and science, particularly 
after 1859. 
Three educational Bills introduced. Local rate proposed. 

Failure to agree. All withdrawn. 
Commons asked to declare in favor of rate aid and local Boards. Two 
Educational Bills introduced. 

First bill tabled. Second bill withdrawn. Education Department 
formed. 
A Royal Commission to inquire into the state of popular education in 
England asked for. 

The Duke of Newcastle's Commission created. Its Report pubHshed 
in 1861. (R. 303.) 
No acceptable scheme reported. Code of 1861 proposed. 

No advance. "Payment by results" begun [1862]. Code adopted. 
Schools Inquiry Commission appointed on endowed schools. 

Report of the Schools Inquiry Commission in 1867. 
Report of a Select Committee of the House of Commons on Educa- 
tion. 
The Government introduced proposals as to education. 

Voted down. 
Government Bill proposing changes in distribution and larger grants. 

Parliament adjourned without action. 
Endowed Schools' Act passed. 
Two Educational Bills introduced. 

Withdrawn at the request of the Government. 
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 introduced. 

Much amended and passed. (R. 304.) Beginning of a National sys- 
tem of education. 
Religious Tests at universities withdrawn (R. 305) . 



The leaders in the conflict. The main leader in the parHa- 
mentary struggle to establish national education, from the death 
of Whitbread, in 1815, to about 1835, was Henry, afterwards 
Lord Brougham. He was aided by such men as Blackstone, and 
Bentham and his followers, and, after about 1837, by such men 
as Dickens, Carlyle, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill. Dickens, 
by his descriptions, helped materially to create a sentiment favor- 
able to education, as a right of the people rather than a charity. 
He stood strongly for a compulsory and non-sectarian state sys- 
tem of education that would transform the children of his day 
into generous, self-respecting, and intelligent men and women. 
Carlyle saw in education a cure for social evils, and held that one 



636 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




of the first functions of government was to impart the gift of 
thinking to its future citizens. Writing, in 1840, he said: 

Who would suppose that education were a thing which had to be 
advocated on the ground of local expediency, or any ground? As if it 
stood not on the basis of everlasting duty as a prime necessity of man. 

Brougham was untiring in his efforts for popular education, 
and some idea as to the interest he awakened may be inferred 
from the fact that his Observations on the 
Education of the People, published in 1825, 
went through twenty editions the first 
year. He introduced bills, secured com- 
mittees of inquiry, made addresses,^ and 
used his pen in behalf of the education of 
the people. His belief in the power of 
education to improve a people was very 
large. Warning the "Lawgivers of Eng- 
land" to take heed, he once said: 

Let the soldier be abroad, if he will; he can 
do nothing in this age. There is another per- 
sonage abroad, a person less imposing — in the 
eye of some insignificant. The Schoolmaster 
is abroad, and I trust him, armed with his 
primer, against the soldier in full uniform array. 

The conqueror stalks onward with the "pride, pomp, and circum- 
stance of war," banners flying, shouts rending the air, guns thundering, 
and martial music pealing, to drown the shrieks of the wounded and 
the lamentations for the slain. Not thus the schoolmaster in his 
peaceful vocation. He meditates and prepares in secret the plans 
which are to bless mankind; he slowly gathers around him those who 
are to further their execution; he quietly, though firmly, advances in 
his humble path laboring steadily, but calmly, till he has opened to 
the light all the recesses of ignorance, and torn up by the roots the 
weeds of vice. His is a progress not to be compared with anything 
hke a march ; but it leads to a far more brilliant triumph, and to laurels 
more imperishable than the destroyer of his species, the scourge of the 
world, ever won. 

Parallel with the agitation for some state action for education 
was an agitation for social and political reform. The basis for the 
election of members to the House of Commons was still mediae- 

1 See J. E. G. de Montmorency's State Intervention in English Education, pp. 248- 
85, for Brougham's address to the Commons in 1820 on "The Education of the 
Poor"; and pp. 285-324 for his address before the House of Lords in 1835, on "The 
Education of the People." Both addresses contain an abundance of data as to 
existing conditions and needs. 



Fig. 190 
Lord Brougham 
(1778-1J 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 637 




Fig. 191. An English Village School in 1840 

(After a drawing by Hablot K. Browne, and printed in Charles Dickens's "Master 
Humphrey's Clock ") 

val. Boroughs no longer inhabited still returned members, and 
sparsely settled regions returned members out of all proportion 
to the newly created city populations. Few, too, could vote. 
Only about 160,000 persons in a population of 10,000,000 had, 
early in the century, the right of the franchise. The city popula- 
tions were practically disfranchised in favor of rural landlords, 
the nobility, and the clergy. In 1828 Protestant Non-Conform- 
ists were relieved of their political disability, and in 1829 a similar 
enfranchisement was extended to Catholics. In 1832 came the 
first real voting reform in the passage of the so-called Third 
Reform Bill,^ after a most bitter parHamentary struggle. This 
reapportioned the membership of the House on a more equitable 
basis, and enfranchised those who owned or leased lands or 
buildings of a value of £10 a year. The result of this was to en- 
franchise the middle class of the population ; increase the number 
of voters (1836) from about 175,000 to about 839,500 out of 
6,023,000 adult males; and effectively break the power of the 
House of Lords to elect the House of Commons. Progressive 

1 So called because the House of Lords rejected the first two passed by the Com- 
mons, and finally accepted the third only because the King had agreed to create 
enough new Lords to pass the bill unless it were enacted by the upper House. 



638 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

legislation now became much easier to secure, and in 1833 a Bill 
making a grant of £20,000 a year to aid in building schoolhouses 
for elementary schools — - the first government aid for elementary 
education ever voted in England — became a law (R. 299). 
During the few years following the passage of the Reform Bill 
many progressive measures were enacted, among which should be 
mentioned the aboHtion of slavery in the colonies; the beginnings 
of legislation looking to a scientific treatment of poverty and non- 
employment; the Municipal Reform Act (1835); the institution 
of the penny post (1839); and the abolition of the Corn Laws 
(1846); while after 1837 education began to take a prominent 
place in the programs of the new working-class movement. 

Progress aiter 1833. The Law of 1833, though, made but the 
merest beginnings, and up to 1840 the money granted was given 
to the two great national school societies, and without regulation. 
Beginning in 1840, and continuing up to the beginnmgs of na- 
tional education, in 1870, the grants were state-controlled and 
distributed through the different educational societies. The 
total of these grants, by years, and the proportional share of the 
different educational societies are well shown in the chart (Fig. 192.) 
In 1846 the grants were extended to maintenance as well, and in 
1847 Catholic and Wesleyan societies were admitted to share in 
the grants. Soon thereafter we note a sharp upward turn of the 
curve, though the Church-of-England schools obtained the 
greater proportion of the increased funds. Proposals to add local 
taxation, in 1853 and 1856, were dropped ahnost as soon as made. 
The commercial and manufacturing interests, though, secured 
separate aid for art and science instruction (1841, 1853), and thf 
creation of national art training-schools (1853). Training-schoolt 
for teachers also were begun, and aided by grants. In 1845 the 
EngHsh "pupil-teacher" system^ also was begun in an effort to 
supply teachers of some Kttle training. A State Department of 
Education was created, in 1856, though without much power, and 
the various "Minutes" which were now adopted were organized 
into a system and presented to Parliament as a School Code, in 
1 86 1, and finally approved. 

New Educational Commissions were created to inquire into 
educational conditions and needs in 1858 and 1864, and these 
reported in 1861 and 1867, but without important results. The 

^ This was a development of the monitorial system of training, and was virtually 
an apprenticeship form of teacher-training. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 639 

most notable of these was the Duke of Newcastle's Commission, 
appointed in 1858 to review conditions, progress, and needs, and 
to make recommendations for the future. This Commission re- 
ported in 1 86 1. It stated that one in every eight of the popula- 
tion was then in some kind of school ; gave statistics as to condi- 



700,000 
650,000 
600,000 
650,000 






























1 






















A 




























/- 


/ 


\ 




1 


1 



















■il 


/ 




\ 




J 


























V^ 


V 


<s/ 




/ 




















7 

SI 


r 


1 


\ 




/ 


/ 


















i\ 1 
SI / 
h-j »/ 






\ 


^ 


J 




















■3/0/ 






























A/ *7 




























/ 


ox 
.07 




























i: 


?i 




























1 


■\^^ 


















BO. 000 










r 








.onv6 


=ssi 


/- 


-^ 


^ 


_^ 


^ 






^^ 




BB 




„ FOBt'G'i-S?^^'^ 


.^ 




.^ 


\^ESLE 


YANS_J .^ 





;;^ 




risH^ 


^= 


M^ 


:^^^^-^ 


CATHOLICS 








1 



Fig. 192. Expenditure from the Education Grants, 1839-70 
Between 1833 and 1839 no Government regulation of grants. The above figures 
do not include administration expenses, or grants made to Scotland (about the same 
in amount as the Br. & F. S. Soc.) or to the Parochial Schools Union (very small). 
The drop in the curve between 1862 and 1867 was due to the mtroduction of the 
"payment by results" plan. 

tions (R. 303 a) ; and held that the plan of leaving popular educa- 
tion to the voluntary initiative of communities had been justified 
by the results. The report presented no plan for national organi- 
zation, but recommended a number of minor changes in condi- 
tions. In particular it recommended the introduction of the 
system of "payment by results " — that is, of making money 
grants to schools on the basis of the number of pupils passing set 
examinations in reading, writing, and arithmetic (R. 303 b) . This 



640 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



plan was begun in 1862, and the consequent drop in money grants 
for a few years thereafter is shown in the curves of the chart. 
The other Commission, appointed, known as the Taunton Schools 
Inquiry Commission (1864-67), dealt with the old endowed 
schools, and in particular called attention to the lack of secondary- 
school facihties, especially in the cities, and recommended an ex- 
tension of secondary-school facilities and a democratization of the 
whole system of secondary education. The important legislation 
of this period was the freeing of the old universities from Church- 
of-England control (R. 305) and making them national in spirit. 
Difficulties encountered. In the meantime liberal lead.ers, 
Schools Inquiry Commissions, official reports, and educational 
propagandists continued to pile up evi- 
dence as to the inadequacy of the old vol- 
untary system. A few examples, out of 
hundreds that might be cited, will be men- 
tioned here. Lord Macaulay, in an ad- 
dress made in Parliament, in 1847 (R- 30o)j 
defending a ''Minute" of the "Committee 
of Privy Council on Education" (created 
in 1839) proposing the nationalization of 
education, held it to be " the right and duty 
of the State to provide for the education 
of the common people," as an exercise of 
self-protection, and warned the Commons 
of dangers to come if the progressive ten- 
dencies of the time were not listened to. 
The Census Returns of 1851, as well as the 
abundance of data published by the Schools 
Liquiry Commissions, were effectively used to reveal the inade- 
quate provisions for the education of the masses. The Reports 
of the school inspectors, too, revealed conditions in need of being 
remedied in all phases of educational effort. The Report on the 
Apprenticing of Pauper Children (R. 301) is selected as typical 
of many similar reports. 

So deeply ingrained, though, was the English conception of 
education as a private and voluntary and religious affair and no 
business of the State; so self-contained were the English as a 
people; and so little did they know or heed the progress made in 
other lands, that the arguments for national action encountered 
tremendous opposition from the Conservative elements, and often 




Fig. 193 

Lord Macaulay 

(1800-59) 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 641 



Facts revealed by the Census of 1851 



Items 


1833 


1851 


(i) Population of England and Wales 


14,400,000 

2,000,000 

12,400,000 

420,000 

2,604,000 

14,897 

24,074 

481,728 

795,219 
1 14.6 

30-5 


17,927,609 


(2) Middle and upper classes population 

(3) Laboring class population 


2,489,94s 
15,437,664 


(4) Population 3-12 years of age of (2) 


522,888 


(5) Population 3-12 years of age of (3) 


3,241,010 


(6) Number of schools for children of (2) 

(7) Number of schools for children of (3) 

(8) Pupils of class (2) in schools 

(9) Pupils of class (3) in schools 

(10) Percentage of children of class (2) at school. . . 

(11) Percentage of children of class (3) at school.. . 


16,324 

29,718 

546,396 

1,597,982 

104.4 

49.2 



were opposed even by Liberals. The reasoning of Sir James Kay- 
Shuttleworth (R. 302), Secretary of the Committee of Council on 
Education and one of the clearest heads in England in his day, 
who held that a fee for instruction had a moral value and vindi- 
cated personal freedom, and who resented the interference of the 
State in the matter of a parent's relation to his child, was typical 
of thousands of others. Edward Baines (1774-1848), proprietor 
of the Leeds Mercury, the chief Liberal organ in northern Eng- 
land, bitterly opposed any action looking toward nationaHzing 
education. He expressed the feeling of many when he wrote: 

Civil government is no fit agency for the training of families or of 
souls. . . . Throw the people on their own resources in education, as 
you did in industry; and be assured, that, in a nation so full of intelli- 
gence and spirit, Freedom and Competition will give the same stim- 
ulus to improvement in our schools, as they have done in our manu- 
factures, our husbandry, our shipping, and our commerce. 

The beginnings of national organization. By 1865 it had be- 
come evident to a majority that the voluntary system, whatever 
its merits, would never succeed in educating the nation, and from 
this time forth the demand for some acceptable scheme for the 
organization of national education became a part of a still more 
general movement for political and social reform. Once more, as 
in 1832-33, an education law was enacted following the passage 
of a bill for electoral reform and the extension of the suffrage. 

Though the Liberal Party was in power, it was well satisfied 
with the Reform Act of 1832 because through it the middle classes 
of the population, which the Liberal Party represented, had gained 
control of the government. The country, though, was not — the 



642 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

working-classes in particular demanding a share in the govern- 
ment. Finally the demand became too strong to be resisted, and 
the Second Reform Act, of 1867, became a law. This abolished 
a number of the remaining smaller boroughs, and greatly extended 
the right to vote. In the country the amount of property to be 
owned to vote was reduced from £10 to £5, and the leasehold 
value from £50 to £1 2. In the cities and towns the vote was now 
given to all householders, and to all lodgers who paid a yearly 
rental of £10. This legislation gave the vote to a vastly increased 
number of people, particularly city workers,^ and was a political 
revolution for England of great magnitude. 

From the passage of this new Reform Act to 1870, the organiza- 
tion of national education only awaited the formulation of some 
acceptable scheme. "We must educate our new masters," now 
became a common expression. The main question was how to 
create schools to do what the voluntary schools had shown them- 
selves able to do for a part, but were unable to do for all, without 
at the same time destroying the vast denominational system^ 
that, in spite of its defects, had "done the great service of rearing 
a race of teachers, spreading schools, setting up a standard of 
education, and generally making the introduction of a national 
system possible." The way in which these "vested interests" 
were cared for was typically English, and characteristic of the 
strong sense of obligation of the Enghsh people. In 1870 a com- 
promise law was proposed and carried. Mr. Gladstone, then 
Prime Minister, stated the attitude of the Government in fram- 
ing the new law, when he said : ^ 

It was with us an absolute necessity — a necessity of honour and a 
necessity of policy — to respect and to favour the educational estab- 
lishments and machinery we found existing in the country. It was 
impossible for us to join in the language or to adopt the tone which 
was conscientiously and consistently taken up by some members of 
the House, who look upon these voluntary schools, having generally 
a denominational character, as admirable passing expedients, fit, in- 

1 In 1885 the same liberty was extended to rural laborers. This added two mil- 
lion more voters, and gave England almost full manhood suffrage. Finally, in 1918, 
some five million women were added to the voting classes. 

2 Nearly two million children had been provided with school accommodations, 
three fourths of which had been done by those associated with the Church of Eng- 
land. In doing this the Church had spent some £6,270,000 on school buildings, and 
had raised some £8,500,000 in voluntary subscriptions for maintenance. The Gov- 
ernment had also paid out some £6,500,000 in grants, since 1833. In 1870 it was 
estimated that 1,450,000 children were on the registers of the state-aided schools, 
while 1,500,000 children, between the ages of six and twelve, were unprovided for. 

* Speech before the House of Commons. July 23, 1870. 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 643 



SCHOOL 

POPULATION 

800,000 



deed, to be tolerated for a time, deserving all credit on account of the 
motives which led to their foundation, but wholly unsatisfactory as 
to their main purpose, 
and therefore to be 
supplanted by some- 
thing they think bet- 
ter That has never 

been the theory of the 
Government. . . . 
When we are ap- 
proaching this great 
work, which we de- 
sire to make complete, 
we ought to have a 
sentiment of thankful- 
ness that so much has 
been done for us. 

, 1-1 i1 850,000- 

Accordingly the 
Elementary Educa- 
tion Bill of 1870 (R. 
304) preserved the 
existing Voluntary 
Schools ; divided the 
country up into 
school districts ; gave 
the denominations a 
short period in which 

to provide schools, „ „ 

'fh 'A { h 'IH ^^^- ^94- Work of the School Boards in 
witn aia lor Duua- providing School Accommodations 

mgS ; and tnere- London taken as a type. Note the deficiency in school 

after, in any place accommodation in 1838, that the voluntary schools 

V. a A(^fl^^p■nr\T "i^^e no appreciable gain on this deficiency uf) to 1870, 

wnere a aenciency ^^le attempt to cope with the situation between 1871 

in school accommo- and 1874, and the long pull of the new Board schools 

1 ,. Irl hp necessary to provide sufficient schools and seats. 

shown to exist. School Boards were to be elected, and they should 

1 "The clergy of the National Society exhibited amazing energy and succeeded, 
according to their own account, in doing in twelve months what in the normal course 
of events would have taken twenty years. By the end of the year they had lodged 
claims for 2885 building grants, out of a total of 3342. They also set to work, with- 
out any governmental assistance, to enlarge their schools and so increased denomi- 
national accommodation enormously. The voluntary contributions in aid of this 
work have been estimated at over £3,000,000. At the same time the annual sub- 
scriptions doubled. ... By 1886, over 3,000,000 places had been added, one-half 
of which were due to voluntary agencies, and Voluntary Schools were providing 
rather more than two-thirds of the school places in the country. In 1897 the pro- 
portion had fallen to three-fifths." (Birchenough, C, History of Elementary Edu- 
cation, pp. 138, 140.) 



■100,000 




644 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

have power to levy taxes and maintain elementary schools. 
Existing Voluntary Schools might be transferred to the School 
Boards, whose schools were to be known as Board Schools. The 
schools were not ordered made free, but the fees of necessitous 
children were to be provided for by the School Boards, and they 
might compel the attendance of all children between the ages of 
five and twelve. Inspection and grants were limited to secular 
subjects, though rehgious teaching was not forbidden. The cen- 
tral government was to be secular and neutral; the local boards 
might decide as they saw fit. Such were the beginnings of na- 
tional education in England. That the new Board Schools met a 
real need, especially in the cities, is shown by the chart on the 
preceding page, giving the results in London. 

IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIONAL SYSTEM 

Progress under the Law of 1870. Beginning in 1871 the Board 
Schools had, by 1893, come to enroll 41 per cent of the pupils in 
elementary schools in England, as against 44 per cent in Volun- 
tary Schools, and by 1903 the proportions were 49 per cent to 39 
per cent. By 1902 the government grants for maintenance had 
reached, for all schools, £8,000,000 a year, and the Board Schools 
were rapidly outrunning the Voluntary Schools both in numbers 
and in per-capita expenditures. The Board Schools had made 
their greatest headway in the cities. In 1895 there were still 
some 11,000 small parishes which had no Board Schools, and in 
consequence paid no direct taxes for schools. Of these, 8000 had 
only Church-of-England Voluntary Schools. 

In 1880 elementary education had been made fully compulsory, 
and in .1891 largely free. In 1893 the age for exemption from 
attendance was fixed at eleven, and in 1899 this was raised to 
twelve. In 1888 county and borough councils had been created, 
better to enforce the Act and to extend supervision. The Annual 
Codes, from 1870 to 1902, gradually extended governmental con- 
trol through more and more detailed instructions as to inspection, 
the addition of new subjects, and better compulsion to attend. 
In 1899 a Central Board of Education, under a President and a 
Parhamentary Secretary, was created, to consolidate in one body 
the work formerly done by: 

d. The Committee of Council on Education (established 1839), 

which administered the grants for elementary education. 
b. The Department of Science and Art (established 1853), which 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 645 

administered the grants for special and evening instruction in 
science and art. 

c. The Charity Commissioners, to which had been given (1874) 
supervision of the old educational trusts and endowments for 
education. 

d. The educational functions of the Board of Agriculture. 

This new Board unified the administration of elementary and 
secondary education for the first time in English history. 

By about 1895 the strain on the Voluntary Schools had become 
hard to bear. The Church resented the encroachments of the 
State on its ancient privilege of training the young, and the larger 
resources which the Board Schools could command. In 1895 the 
Conservative party won the parliamentary elections, and re- 
mained in power for some years. This was the opportunity of 
the Voluntary Schools, and in 1897 a special national-aid grant 
of five shillings per pupil in average daily attendance was made 
to the Voluntary Schools. This simply increased the general dis- 
satisfaction, and there was soon a general demand for new legis- 
lation that would reconcile the whole question of national educa- 
tion. The Law of 1902 was the ultimate result. 

The Annexation Law of 1902. The Balfour Education Act of 
1902 marks the beginning of a new period in English education. 
For the first time in English history education of all grades — ele- 
mentary, secondary, and higher; voluntary and state — -was 
brought under the control of one single local authority, and Vol- 
untary Schools were taken over and made a charge on the ''rates " 
equally with the Board Schools. New local Educational Com- 
mittees and Councils replaced the old School Boards, and all 
secular instruction in state-aided schools of all types was now 
placed under their control. Religious instruction could continue 
where desired. In addition, one third of the property of England, 
which had heretofore escaped all direct taxation for education, 
was now compelled to pay its proper share. The foundation prin- 
ciple that "the wealth of the State must educate the children of 
the State" was now applied, for the first time. 

The State now abandoned the old policy of merely supervising 
andassisting voluntary associations to maintain schools, in com- 
petition with state-provided schools, and assumed the whole 
responsibility for the secular instruction of the people. Though 
the law awakened intense opposition from those who felt that it 
"riveted the hand of the cleric on the schools of the land," it 



646 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

nevertheless equalized and unified educational provisions; paved 
the way for much future progress; made the general provision of 
secondary education possible; and represented an important new 
step in the process of creating a national system of education 
for the people. Under this Law much has been done by the 
new Central Board of Education, and subsequent supplementary 
legislation, to increase materially the efficiency of the education 
provided. 

Since 1902 the cost for education per pupil has been increased 
more than one half. The local authorities, to whom were given 
large powers of control, have levied taxes liberally, and the State 
has also increased its grants. Since 1902 also there has been a 
continual agitation for a resettlement of the educational question 
along broad national lines. Bills have been introduced, and 
important committees have considered the matter, but no af- 
firmative action was taken. By the time of the opening of 
the World War it may be said that English opinion had about 
agreed upon the principle of pubHc control of all schools, 
absolute religious freedom for teachers, local option as to re- 
ligious instruction, large local liberty in management and con- 
trol, well-trained and well-paid teachers, and the fusing of all 
types of schools into a democratic and truly national school sys- 
tem, strong in its unity and national elements, but free from cen- 
tralized bureaucratic control. It was left for the World War to 
give emphasis to this . national need and to permit the final 
creation of such an educational organization. 

The incorporation of secondary education into the national 
system. For centuries the education of the small ruling class ha( 
been conducted by the private tutor and the endowed secondary 
school, and had been completed by a few years at Oxford or Cam- 
bridge. The Reform Bill of 1832 had raised the middle commer- 
cial and industrial classes to power, and had created new demands 
for secondary and higher education for the sons of this class. The 
old endowed schools were now no longer sufficient in numbers, 
and the result was the founding of many private and Joint-stock- 
company secondary schools to minister to the new educational 
needs. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 enfranchised a very much 
greater number of citizens, and the increasing wealth and the 
increasing demands for educational advantages led to an insist- 
ence for a further extension along secondary and higher lines. 
The result was seen in the investigation of the nine ''Great 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 647 

Public Schools" of England/ by the Lord Clarendon Commission 
(1861-64); and the appointment of the British Schools Inquiry 
Commission of 1864-67, to inquire into the 820 other endowed 
schools and the 122 proprietary or joint-stock-company schools of 
the land. The Report of the first led to the Public Schools Act of 
1868, reforming abuses and regulating* the use of their old endow- 
ments. The second pointed out the great deficiency then existing 
in secondary education,- and led to the enactment of the Endowed 
Schools Act of 1869, placing all endowed schools under centralized 
supervision. We see here the beginnings of state supervision and 
control of the age-old endowments for Latin grammar schools and 
other types of schools for secondary training. The repeal of the 
old Religious-Tests-for-Degrees legislation, at the old universities 
(R. 305), in 187 1, transformed these from Church-of-England into 
aational institutions, and opened up the v/hole range of education 
to all who could meet the standards and pay the fees. 

Under the Act of 1870 many local school boards, especially in 
the manufacturing cities, began to satisfy the new needs by the 
organization of Higher Grade Schools, or High Schools, to supple- 
ment the work of the elementary schools and to extend upward, 
in a truly democratic fashion, the educational ladder. In this 
movement the manufacturing cities of Sheffield, Birmingham, 
and Manchester were the leaders. In these three cities also, as 
well as in four others (Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, and London) ^ 
new modern-type universities were created. The Department of 
Science and Art (created in 1853) also began, in 1872, to give 
large grants to the cities for the establishment of a three-years' 
course in science, for the encouragement of scientific training. 
These new secondary- type schools, providing for the direct pas- 
sage of children from the elementary to the secondary schools, 
with many free places for capable students, served to increase the 
friction between rate-aided schools on the one hand, and volun- 
tary and endowed and proprietary schools on the other. Carry- 

1 These were the seven endowed secondary boarding schools — Winchester (1382), 
Eton (1440), Shrewsbury (1552), Westminster (1560), Rugby (1567), Harrow 
(15 71), and Charterhouse (16 11) — and the two endowed day schools, — Saint 
Paul's (1510) and Merchant Taylors' (1561). 

2 At least one hundred towns, the Report showed, with a population of five 
thousand or over had no endowed secondary school, and London, with a population 
then (1867) of over three million, had but twenty-six schools and less than three 
thousand pupils enrolled. All the new manufacturing cities were in even worse 
condition than London. 

' The University of London was originally founded in 1836, and reorganized ir 
190C. 



648 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

I'ng out, as they did, Huxley's idea of a broad educational ladder,' 
they also represented a very democratic innovation in English 
educational procedure. 

In 1894 a Commission — -a favorite English method for con- 
sidering vexatious questions — was appointed, under the chair- 
manship of Mr. James (afterwards Lord) Bryce, "to consider the 
best methods of establishing a well-organized system of secondary 
education in England." The Report was important and influ- 
ential. It recommended the creation of a general Board of Edu- 
cation under a responsible government Minister, with a perma- 
nent Secretary and a Consultative Educational Council (as was 
done in 1899); the establishment of local county and borough 
boards to provide adequate secondary-school accommodations, 
with aid from the "rates"; the inspection of secondary schools 
by the Central Board of Education; the professional training of 
secondary-school teachers; and a great extension of the free- 
scholarship plan to children from the elementary schools. On 
this last point the Report said: ^ 

We have to consider the means whereby the children of the less well- 
to-do classes of our population may be enabled to obtain such secondary 
education as may be suitable and needful for them. As we have not 
recommended that secondary education shall be provided free of cost 
to the whole community, we deem it all the more needful that ample 
provision be made by every local authority for enabling selected chil- 
dren of poorer parents to climb the educational ladder. . . . The assist- 
ance we have contemplated should be given by means of a carefully 
graduated system of scholarships, varying in value in the age at which 
they are awarded and the class of school or institution at which they , 
are tenable. * 

The Act of 1902 unified control of both elementary and secon- 
dary education. Any private or endowed secondary school was 
left free to accept or reject government aid and inspection, but, , 
if the aid were accepted, inspection and the following of govern- I 
ment plans were required. Secondary education must provide 
for scholars up to or beyond the age of sixteen. No attempt was 
made to unify the work and character of the secondary schools, 
it being clearly recognized that, in England at least, these must 
be suited to the different requirements of the scholars, the means 

1 The scientist Thomas Huxley was a London School Board member, and, speak- 
ing as such, he expressed the views of many when he said: "I conceive it to be our 
duty to make a ladder from the gutter to the university along which any child may 
climb." 

2 Royal {Bryce) Commission on Secondary Education, vol. i, p. 299. London, 189s 



z 



Local and 

Voluntary 

Schools 



Fig. 






K 



Sl2 

s.. 



a 10 

a 



ii 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 649 

of the parents, the age at which schooling will stop, and the prob- 
able place in the social organism of England which the pupils will 
occupy. By 19 10, out of 841 secondary schools in England re- 
ceiving grants of state aid, 325 were supported by local authori- 
ties and were the crea- 
tions of the preceding four 
decades. Most of the oth- 
ers represented old Latin 
grammar-school founda- 
tions, thus incorporated 
into the national system, 
and without that violence 
and destruction of endow- 
ments which character- 
ized the transformations 
in France and Italy. 

A national system at 
last evolved. It is a little 
more than two centuries 
from the founding of the 
Society for the Promotion 
of Christian Knowledge 
(1699) to the very import- 
ant Fisher Education Act ^ 
of August, 1 9 1 8 . The first 
marked the beginnings of 
the voluntary system ; the 
second ''the first real at- 
tempt in England to lay 
broad and deep the foun- 
dations of a scheme of ed- 
ucation which would be 
truly national." This Act, 
passed by Parliament in the midst of a war which called upon the 
English people for heavy sacrifices, completed the evolution of 
two centuries and organized the educational resources — element- 
ary, secondary, evening, adult, technical, and higher — into one 

^ Known as the "Education Act, 1918" (8 and 9 Geo. V, ch. 39). The Act has 
been reprinted in full in the Biennial Survey of Education, IQ16-18, ci the United 
States Commissioner of Education, in the chapter on Education in Great Britain. 
It also has been reprinted as an appendix to Moore, E. C, What the War teaches 
dbout Education, New York, 19 19. 



i 



r 



Endowed 

and 
Proprietary 
Schools 



195. The English Educational 
System as finally evolved 

The years, for the divisions of English educa- 
tion, are only approximate, as English educa- 
tion is more flexible than that found in most 
other lands. 



650 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

national system, animated by a national purpose, and aimed at 
the accomplishment for the nation of twentieth-century ends on 
the most democratic basis of any school system in Europe. In so 
doing Huxley's educational ladder has not only been changed 
into a broad highway, but the educational traditions of England 
(R. 306) have been preserved and moulded anew. 

The central national supervisory authority has been still further 
strengthened; the compulsion to attend greatly extended; and the 
voice of the State has been uttered in a firmer tone than ever 
before in EngHsh educational history. Taxes have been increased; 
the scope of the school system extended; all elements of the sys- 
tem better integrated; laggard local educational authorities sub- 
jected to firmer control; the training of teachers looked after more 
carefully than ever before; and the foundations for unlimited im- 
provement and progress in education laid down. Still, in doing 
all this, the deep English devotion to local liberties has been 
clearly revealed. The dangers of a centralized French-type edu- 
cational bureaucracy have been avoided; necessary, and relatively 
high, minimum standards have been set up, but without sacrific- 
ing that variety which has always been one of the strong points 
of English educational effort; and the legitimate claims of the 
State have been satisfied without destroying local initiative and 
independence. In this story of two centuries and more of struggk 
to create a really national system of education for the people wt 
see strongly revealed those prominent characteristics of English 
national progress — careful consideration of new ideas, keen sen- 
sitiveness to vested rights, strong sense of local liberties and 
responsibilities, large dependence on local effort and good sense, 
progress by compromise, and a slow grafting-on of the best ele- 
ments of what is new without sacrificing the best elements of 
what is old. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Show that the Enghsh method of slow progress and after long discussion 
would naturally result in a plan bearing evidence of many compromises. 

2. What does the extensive Charity-School movement in eighteenth-century 
England indicate as to the comparative general interest in learning in 
England and the other lands we have previously studied? 

3. Show how the Sunday-School instruction, meager as it was, was very 
important in England in paving the way for further educational progress. 

4. What do all the different late eighteenth-century voluntary educational 
movements indicate as to comparative popular interest in education in 
England and Prussia? England and France? 



:> 



NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 651 

5. Can you explain the much greater percentage of city poor in England in 
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than in French or 
German lands? 

6. Can you explain why periods of prolonged warfare are usually followed 
by periods of social and political unrest? 

7. Can you explain why Pestalozzian ideas found such slow acceptance in 
England? 

8. Explain, on the basis of the English adult manufacturing conception of 
education, why monitorial instruction was hailed as "a new expedient, 
parallel and rival to the modern inventions in the mechanical depart- 
ments." 

9. To what extent do we now accept Robert Owen's conception of the 
influence of education on children? 

10. Show how the many philanthropic societies for the education of the 
children of the poor came in as a natural transition from church to state 
education. 

11. Show the importance of the School Societies in accustoming people to 
the idea of free and general education. 

12. Show how the Lancastrian system formed a natural bridge between pri- 
vate philanthropy in education and tax-supported state schools. 

13. Why were the highly mechanical features of the Lancastrian organiza- 
tion so advantageous in its day, whereas we of to-day would regard them 
as such a disadvantage? 

14. Explain how the Lancastrian schools dignified the work of the teacher 
by revealing the need for teacher-training. 

15. Assuming that there may be some validity to the arguments of Kay- 
Shuttleworth, what are the limitations to such reasoning? 

16. What theory as to education would naturally lie behind a "payment-by- 
results " plan of distributing state aid? 

17. Show how English educational development during the nineteenth cen- 
tury has been deeply modified by the progress of democracy. 

18. Show how the English have attained to minimum standards without 
imposing uniform requirements that destroy individuality and initia- 
tive. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following illustrative selections 
are reproduced: 

291. Parliamentary Report: Charity-School Education described. 

292. S.P.C.K.: Cost and Support of Charity-Schools. 

293. Raikes: Description of the Gloucester Sunday Schools. 

294. Guthrie: Organization, Support, and Work of a Ragged School. 

295. Smith, A.: On the Education of the Common People. 

296. Malthus: On National Education. 

297. Smith, S.: The School of Lancaster described. 

298. Philanthropist: Automatic Character of the Monitorial Schools. 

299. Montmorency, de: The First Parliamentary Grant for Education. 

300. Macaulay: On the Duty of the State to Provide Education. 

301. Mosely: Evils of Apprenticing the Children of Paupers. 

302. Kay-Shuttleworth: Typical Reasoning in Opposition to Free Schools 

303. Macnamera: The Duke of Newcastle Commission Report. 

304. Statute: Elementary Education Act of 1870. 

305. Statute: Abolition of Religious Tests at the Universities. 

306. Times: The Educational Traditions of England. 



652 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Characterize the type of education described by the witness (291), 

2. Considering equipment provided and comparative money values, then 
and now, about how much of an effort did support (292) involve? 

3. What class of children did Raikes (293) make provision for? 

4. Characterize the tj^pe of education provided (294) in the Ragged 
Schools. 

5. Would Adam Smith's reasoning (295) still hold true? 

6. Would that of Malthus (296)? 

7. Indicate the improvements Lancaster had made (297, 298) in organi- 
zation and teaching efficiency. 

8. Was the first English parliamentary grant (299) expressive of deep 
national interest? 

Q. Would Macaulay's reasoning (300) still be true? 

10. Is it probable that the apprenticing of paupers had always given such 
(301) results? 

11. How sound was Kay-Shuttleworth's reasoning (302)? 

12. What merit was there to the "payment-by-results" recommendation of 
the Duke of Newcastle Commission (303)? 

13. Just what kind of schools did the Act of 1870 (304) make provision for? 

14. Have we ever had such religious requirements as those so long main- 
tained (305) at the English universities? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Allen, W. O. B. and McClure, E. Two Hundred Years; History oj 

S.P.C.K. 1698-1898. 
Adams, Francis. History of the Elementary School Contest in England. 
*Binns, H. B. A Century of Education, 1 808-1 Q08 , History of the British 

and Foreign School Society. 
*Birchenough, C. History of Elementary Education in England and Wales 
since 1800. 
Escott, T. H. S. Social Transformations of the Victorian Era. 
Harris, J. H. Robert Raikes; the Man and his Work. 
*Holman, H. English National Education. 

*Montmorency, J. E. G. de. The Prog) ess of Education in England. 
*Montmorency, J. E. G. de. State Intervention in English Education to 

1833- 
'•'Salmon, David. Joseph Lancaster. 



CHAPTER XXV 

AWAKENING AN EDUCATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN 
THE UNITED STATES 

I. EARLY NATIONAL ATTITUDES AND INTERESTS 

The American problem. The beginnings of state educational 
organization in the United States present quite a different history 
from that traced for Prussia, France, Italy, or England. While 
the parochial school existed in the Central Colonies, and in time 
had to be subordinated to state ends; and while the idea of educa- 
tion as a charity had been introduced into all the Anglican Colo- 
nies, and later had to be stamped out; the problem of educational 
organization in America was not, as in Europe, one of bringing 
church schools and old educational foundations into harmonious 
working relations with the new state school systems set up. In- 
stead the old educational foundations were easily transformed to 
adapt them to the new conditions, while only in the Central Colo- 
nies did the religious-charity conception of education give any 
particular trouble. The American educational problem was 
essentially that of first awakening, in a new land, a consciousness 
of need for general education; and second, that of developing a 
willingness to pay for what it finally came to be deemed desirable 
to provide. 

By the middle of the eighteenth century, as we have pointed 
out (p. 438), the earlier religious interests in America had clearly 
begun to wane. In the New England Colonies the school of the 
civil town had largely replaced the earlier religious school. In 
the Middle Colonies many of the parochial schools had died out. 
In the Southern Colonies, where the classes in society and negro 
slavery made common schools impossible, and the lack of city life 
and manufacturing made them seem largely unnecessary, the 
common school had tended to disappear. Even in New England, 
where the Calvinistic conception of the importance of education 
had most firmly established the idea of school support, the eight- 
eenth century witnessed a constant struggle to prevent the dying- 
out of that which an earlier generation had deemed it important 
to create. 

Effect of the war on education. The effect of the American 
War for Independence, on all types of schools, was disastrous. 



654 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The growing troubles with the mother country had, for more 
than a decade previous to the opening of hostilities, tended to 
concentrate attention on other matters than schooling. PoHtical 
discussion and agitation had largely monopolized the thinking of 
the time. 

With the outbreak of the war education everywhere suffered 
seriously. Most of the rural and parochial schools closed, or 
continued a more or less intermittent existence. In New York 
City, then the second largest city in the country, practically all 
schools closed with British occupancy and remained closed until 
after the end of the war. The Latin grammar schools and acade- 
mies often closed from lack of pupils, while the colleges were 
almost deserted. Harvard and Kings, in particular, suffered 
grievously, and sacrificed much for the cause of Hberty. The 
war engrossed the energies and the resources of the peoples of the 
different Colonies, and schools, never very securely placed in the 
afifectiojns of the people, outside of New England, were allowed to 
fall into decay or entirely disappear. The period of the Revolu- 
tion and the period of reorganization which followed, up to the 
beginning of the national government (1775-89), were together 
a time of rapid decline in educational advantages and increasing 
illiteracy among the people. Meager as had been the opportuni- 
ties for schooling before 1775, the opportunities by 1790, except 
in a few cities and in the New England districts, had shrunk 
almost to the vanishing point. For Boston (R. 307), Providence 
(Rs. 309, 310), and a number of other places we have good pic- 
tures preserved of the schools which actually did exist. 

The close of the war found the country both impoverished and 
exhausted. All the Colonies had made heavy sacrifices, many 
had been overrun by hostile armies, and the debt of the Union 
and of the States was so great that many thought it could never 
be paid. The thirteen States, individually and collectively, with 
only 3,380,000 people, had incurred an indebtedness of $75,000,000 
for the prosecution of the conflict. Commerce was dead, the 
Government of the Confederation was impotent, petty insurrec- 
tions were common, the States were quarreling continually with 
one another over all kinds of trivial matters, England still re- 
mained more or less hostile, and foreign complications began to 
appear. That during such a crucial period, and for some years 
following, but little or no attention was anywhere given to the 
question of education was only natural. 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 655 

No real educational consciousness before a bout 1820. Re- 
gardless of the national land grants for education made to the 
new States (p. 523), the provisions of the different state constitu- 
tions (R. 259), the beginnings made here and there in the few 
cities of the time, and the early state laws (R. 262), it can hardly 
be said that the American people had developed an educational 
consciousness, outside of New England and New York, before 
about 1820, and in some of the States, especially in the South, a 
state educational consciousness was not awakened until very 
much later. Even in New England there was a steady decline in 
education during the first fifty years of the national history. 

There were many reasons in the national life for this lack of 
interest in education among the masses of the people. The simple 
agricultural life of the time, the homogeneity of the people, the 
absence of cities, the isolation and independence of the villages, 
the lack of full manhood suffrage in a number of the States, the 
want of any economic demand for education, and the fact that no 
important pohtical question calling for settlement at the polls 
had as yet arisen, made the need for schools and learning seem a 
relatively minor one. The country, too, was still very poor. The 
Revolutionary War debt still hung in part over the Nation, and 
the demand for money and labor for all kinds of internal improve- 
ments was very large. The country had few industries, and its 
foreign trade was badly hampered by European nations. Ways 
and means of strengthening the existing Government and holding 
the Union together,^ rather than plans which could bear fruit only 
in the future, occupied the attention of the leaders of the time. 

When the people had finally settled their pohtical and com- 
mercial future by the War of 181 2-14, and had built up a national 
consciousness on a democratic basis in the years immediately fol- 
lowing, and the Nation at last possessed the energy, the money, 
and the interest for doing so, they finally turned their energies 
toward the creation of a democratic system of public schools. In 
the meantime, education, outside of New England, and in part 
even there, was left largely to private individuals, churches, in- 
corporated school societies, and such state schools for the children 

1 "The Constitution," as John Quincy Adams expressed it, "was extorted from 
the grinding necessities of a reluctant people" to escape anarchy and the ultimate 
entire loss of independence, and many had grave doubts as to the permanence of 
the Union. It was not until after the close of the War of 1812 that belief in the 
stability of the Union and in the capacity of the people to govern themselves became 
the belief of the many rather than the very few, and plans for education and national 
development began to obtain a serious hearing. 



656 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

of the poor as might have been provided by private or state 
funds, or the two combined. 

The real interest in advanced education. In so far as the 
American people may be said to have possessed a real interest in 
education during the first half-century of the national existence, 
it was manifested in the establishment and endowment of acade- 
mies and colleges rather than in the creation of schools for the 
people. The colonial Latin grammar school had been almost 
entirely an English institution, and never well suited to American 
needs. As democratic consciousness began to arise, the demand 
came for a more practical institution, less exclusive and less aris- 
tocratic in character, and better adapted in its instruction to the 
needs of a frontier society. Arising about the middle of the 
eighteenth centur y , a number of so-called Academies had been 
founded before the new National Government took shape. While 
essentially private institutions, arising from a church founda- 
tion, or more commonly a local subscription or endowment, 
it became customary for towns, counties, and States to assist in 
their maintenance, thus making them semi-public institutions. 
Their management, though, usually remained in private hands, 
or under boards or associations.^ 

Beside offering a fair type of higher training ^ before the days 
of high schools, the academies also became training-schools for 
teachers, and before the rise of the normal schools were the chief 
source of supply for the better grade of elementary teachers. 

^ After the beginning of the national Hfe a number of States founded and endowed 
a state system of academies. Massachusetts, in 1797, granted land endowments 
to approved academies. Georgia, in 1783, created a system of county academies 
for the State. New York extended state aid to its academies, in 1813, having put 
them under state inspection as early as 1787. Maryland chartered many acade- 
mies between 1801 and 1817, and authorized many lotteries to provide them with, 
funds, as did also North Carolina. The Rhode Island General Assembly chartered 
many academies, and aided them by lotteries. Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, 
among western States, also provided for county systems of academies. 

^ The study of Latin and a little Greek had constituted the curriculum of the old 
Latin grammar school, and its purpose had been almost exclusively to prepare boys 
for admission to the colony colleges. In true EngHsh style, Latin was made the 
language of the classroom, and even attempted for the playground as well. As a 
concession, reading, writing, and arithmetic were sometimes taught. The new 
caademies, while retaining the study of Latin, and usually Greek, though now taught 
through the medium of the English, added a number of new studies adapted to the 
needs of a new society. English grammar was introduced and soon rose to a place 
of great importance, as did also oratory and declamation. Arithmetic, algebra, 
geometry, geography, and astronomy were in time added, and surveying, rhetoric 
(including some literature), natural and moral philosophy, and Roman antiquities 
were frequently taught. Girls were admitted rather freely to the new academies, 
whereas the grammar schools had been exclusively for boys. For better instruction 
a "female department" was frequently organized. 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 657 

These institutions rendered an important service during the first 
half of the nineteenth century, but were in time displaced by the 
publicly supported and publicly controlled American high school, 
the first of which dates from 1821. This evolution we shall 
describe more in detail a little later on. 

The colleges of the time. Some interest also was taken in col- 
lege education during this early national period. College attend- 
ance, however, was small, as the country was still new and the 
people were poor. As late as 181 5, Harvard graduated a class of 
but 66; Yale of 69; Princeton of 40; Williams of 40; Pennsylvania 
of 15; and the University of South Carolina of 37. After the 
organization of the Union the nine old colonial colleges were re- 
organized, and an attempt was made to bring them into closer 
harmony with the ideas and needs of the people and the govern- 
ments of the States. Dartmouth, Kings (now rechristened 
Columbia), and Pennsylvania were for a time changed into state 
institutions, and an unsuccessful attempt was made to make a 
state university for Virginia out of William and Mary. Fifteen 
additional colleges were organized by 1800, and fourteen more by 
1820. Between 1790 and 1825 there was much discussion as to 
the desirabiUty of founding a national university at the seat of 
government, and Washington in his will (1799) left, for that time, 
a considerable sum to the Nation to inaugurate the new under- 
taking. Nothing ever came of it, however. Before 1825 six 
States — Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Indi- 
iana, and Michigan — had laid the foundations of future state 
universities. The National Government had also granted to each 
new Western State two entire townships of land to help endow a 
university in each — a stimulus which eventually led to the estab- 
lishment of a state university in every Western State. 

A half-century of transition. The first half-century of the 
national life may be regarded as a period of transition from the 
church-control idea of education over to the idea of education 
under the control of and supported by the State. Though many 
of the early States had provided for state school systems in their 
constitutions (R. 259), the schools had not been set up, or set up 
only here and there. It required time to make this change in 
thinking. Up to the period of the begumings of our national 
development education had almost everywhere been regarded as 
an affair of the Church, somewhat akin to baptism, marriage, the 
atiministration of the sacraments, and the burial of the dead. 



658 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Even in New England, which formed an exception, the evolution 
of the civic school from the church school was not yet complete. 

The church charity-school had become, as we have seen (p. 449), 
a familiar institution before the Revolution. The English " Soci- 
ety for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" (p. 449), 
which maintained schools in connection with the Anglican 
churches in the Anglican Colonies and provided an excellent grade 
of charity-school master, withdrew at the close of the Revolution- 
ary War from work in this country. The different churches after 
the war continued their efforts to maintain their church charity- 
schools, though there was for a time a decrease in both their num- 
bers and their effectiveness. 

In the meantime the demand for education grew rather rapidly, 
and the task soon became too big for the churches to handle. 
For long the churches made an effort to keep up, as they were 
loath to relinquish in any way their former hold on the training 
of the young. The churches, however, were not interested in the 
problem except in the old way, and this was not what the new 
democracy wanted. The result was that, with the coming of 
nationality and the slow but gradual growth of a national con- 
sciousness, national pride, national needs, and the gradual devel- 
opment of national resources in the shape of taxable property — 
all alike combined to make secular instead of religious schools 
seem both desirable and possible to a constantly increasing num- 
ber of citizens. 

II. AWAKENING AN EDUCATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 

Between about 1810 and 1830 a number of new forces — phil- 
anthropic, political, social, economic — combined to change the 
earlier attitude by producing conditions which made state rather 
than church control and support of education seem both desirable 
and feasible. The change, too, was markedly facilitated by the 
work of a number of semi-private philanthropic agencies which 
now began the work of founding schools and building up an inter- 
est in education, the most important of which were: (i) the Sun- 
day-School movement; (2) the City School Societies; (3) the 
Lancastrian movement; and (4) the Infant-School Societies. 
These will be described briefly, and their influence in awakening 
an educational consciousness pointed out. 

The Sunday-School movement. The Sunday School, as a 
means of providing the merest rudiments of secular and rehgious 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 659 

learning, had been made, through the initiative of Raikes of 
Gloucester (p. 617), a very important Enghsh institution for 
providing the beginnings of instruction for the children of the city 
poor. Raikes's idea was soon carried to the United States. In 
1786 a Sunday School after the Raikes plan was organized in 
Hanover County, Virginia. In 1787 a Sunday School for African 
children was organized at Charleston, South Carolina. In 1791 
"The First Day, or Sunday School Society," was organized at 
Philadelphia, for the establishment of Sunday Schools in that 
city. In 1793 Katy Ferguson's " School for the Poor " was opened 
in New York, and this was followed by an organization of New 
York women for the extension of secular instruction among the 
poor. In 1797 Samuel Slater's Factory School was opened at 
Pawtucket, Rhode Island. 

Though there had been some Sunday instruction earlier at a 
few places in New England, the introduction of the Sunday School 
from England, in 1786, marked the real beginning of the religious 
Sunday School in America. After the churches had once caught 
the idea of a common religious school on Sundays for the instruc- 
tion of any one, a number of societies were formed to carry on and 
extend the work. The most important of these were: 

1808. The Evangelical Society of Philadelphia. 

1816. The Female Union for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools (New 

York). 
1816. The New York Sunday School Union. 

1816. The Boston Society for the Moral and Religious Instruction of 
the Poor. 

1817. The Philadelphia Sunday and Adult School Union. 
1824. The American Sunday School Union. 

These different types of American Sunday Schools, being 
open to all instead of only to the poor and lowly, had a small 
but an increasing influence in leveling class distinctions and in 
making a common day school seem possible. The movement 
for secular instruction on Sundays, though, soon met in America 
with the opposition of the churches, and before long they took 
over the idea, superseded private initiative and control, and 
changed the character of the instruction from a day of secular 
work to an hour or so of religious teaching. The Sunday School, 
in consequence, never exercised the influence in educational devel- 
opment in America that it did in England. 

The City School Societies. These were patterned after the 
EngHsh charity-school subscription societieSj and were formed in 



66o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

a number of American cities during the first quarter of the nine- 
teenth century for the purpose of providing the rudiments of an 
education to those too poor to pay for schooling. These Societies 
Avere usually organized by philanthropic citizens, willing to con- 
tribute something yearly to provide some little education for a 
few of the many children in the city having no opportunities for 
any instruction. A number of these Societies were able to effect 
some financial connection with the city or the State. 

One of the first of these School Societies was ''The Manumission 
Society," organized in New York, in 1785, for the purpose of 
' mitigating the evils of slavery, to defend the rights of the blacks, 
and especially to give them the elements of an education." Alex- 
ander Hamilton and John Jay were among its organizers. A free 
school for colored pupils was opened, in 1787. This grew and 
prospered and was aided from time to time by the city, and in 
1801 by the State. Finally, in 1834, all its schools were merged 
with those of the "Public School Society" of the city. In 1801 
the first free school for poor white children "whose parents belong 
to no religious society, and who, from some cause or other, cannot 
be admitted into any of the charity schools of the city," was 
opened. This was provided by the "Association of Women 
Friends for the Relief of the Poor," which engaged "a widow 
woman of good education and morals as instructor" at £30 per 
year. This Association also prospered, and received some city or 
state aid up to 1824. By 1823 it was providing free elementary 
education for 750 children. Its schools also were later merged 
with those of the "Public School Society." 

" The Public School Society." Perhaps the most famous of all 
the early subscription societies for the maintenance of schools for 
the poor was the "New York Free School Society," which later 
changed its name to that of "The Public School Society of New 
York." This was organized, in 1805, under the leadership of 
De Witt Clinton, then mayor of the city, he heading the subscrip- 
tion list with a promise of $200 a year for support. On May 14, 
1806, the following advertisement appeared in the daily papers: 

FREE SCHOOL 

The Trustees of the Society for establishing a Free School in the 
city of New York, for the education of such poor children as do not 
belong to, or are not provided for by any religious Society, having 
engaged a Teacher, and procured a School House for the accommo- 
dation of a School, have now the pleasure of announcing that it is 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 66l 

proposed to receive scholars of the descriptions alluded to without 
delay; applications may be made to, &c. 

Four days later the officers of the Society issued a general 
appeal to the public (R. 311), setting forth the purposes of the 
Society and soliciting funds. 

This Society was chartered by the legislature "to provide 




Fig. 196. The First Schoolhouse built by the Free School Society 
IN New York City 

Built in 1809, in Tryon Row. Cost, without site, $13,000 

schooling for all children who are the proper objects of a gratui- 
tous education." It organized free public education in the city, 
secured funds, built schoolhouses, provided and trained teachers, 
and ably supplemented the work of the private and church schools. 
By its energy and its persistence it secured for itself a large share 
of public confidence, and aroused a constantly increasing interest 
in the cause of popular education. In 1853, after it had educated 
over 600,000 children and trained over 1 200 teachers, this Society, 
its work done, surrendered its charter and turned over its buildings 
and equipment to the public-school department of the city, which 
had been created by the legislature in 1842. 

School Societies elsewhere. The "Benevolent Society of the 
City of Baltimore for the Education of the Female Poor," founded 
in 1799, and the "Male Free Society of Baltimore," organized a 
Httle later, were other of these early school societies, though 
neither became so famous as the Public School Society of New 
York. The schools of the city of Washington were started by sub- 
scription, in 1804, and for some time were in part supported by 



662 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

subscriptions from public-spirited citizens.^ This society did an 
important work in accustoming the people of the capital city to 
the provision of some form of free education. 

In 1800 "The Philadelphia Society- for the Free Instruction 
of Indigent Boys" was formed, which a little later changed to 
"The Philadelphia Society for the Establishment and Support of 
Charity Schools." In 1814 "The Society for the Promotion of a 
Rational System of Education" was organized in Philadelphia, 
and four years later the public sentiment awakened by a combina- 
tion of the work of this Society and the coming of the Lancastrian 
system of instruction enabled the city to secure a special law per- 
mitting Philadelphia to organize a system of city schools for the 
education of the children of its poor. Other societies which ren- 
dered useful educational service include the "Mechanics and 
Manufacturers Association," of Providence, Rhode Island, organ- 
ized in 1789 (Rs. 308, 310); "The Albany Lancastrian School 
Society," organized in 1826, for the education of the poor of the 
city in monitorial schools; and the school societies organized in 
Savannah in 1818, and Augusta, in 1821," to afford education to the 
children of indigent parents." Both these Georgia societies re- 
ceived some support from state funds. 

The formation of these school societies, the subscriptions made 
by the leading men of the cities, the bequests for education, and 
the grants of some city and state aid to these societies, all of which 
in time became somewhat common, indicate a slowly rising inter- 
est in providing schools for the education of all. This rising 
interest in education was greatly stimulated by the introduction 
from England, about this time, of a new and what for the time 
seemed a wonderful system for the organization of education, the 
Lancastrian monitorial plan. 

The Lancastrian monitorial schools. Church-of-England ideas 
were not in much favor in the United States for some time after 
the close of the Revolutionary War, and in consequence it was the 
Lancastrian plan which was brought over and popularized. In 
1806 the first monitorial school was opened in New York City, 
and, once introduced, the system quickly spread from Massachu- 

1 Thomas Jefferson's name appears in the first subscription list as giving $200, 
and he was elected a member of the first governing board. The chief sources of 
support of the schools, which up to 1844 remained pauper schools, were subscrip- 
tions, lotteries, a tax on slaves and dogs, certain license fees, and a small appropria- 
tion ($1500) each year from the city council. 

^ This organization opened the first schools in Philadelphia for children regardless 
of religious afl&liation, and for thirty-seven years rendered a useful service there. 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 663 

setts to Georgia, and as far west as Cincinnati, Louisville, and 
Detroit. In 1826 Maryland instituted a state system of Lancas- 
trian schools, wdth a Superintendent of Public Instruction, but in 
1828 abandoned the idea and discontinued the office. A state 
Lancastrian system for North Carolina was proposed in 1832, 
but failed of adoption by the legislature. In 1829 Mexico organ- 
ized higher Lancastrian schools for the Mexican State of Texas. 
In 18 18 Lancaster himself went to America, and was received 
with much distinction. Most of the remaining twenty years of 
his life were spent in organizing and directing schools in various 
parts of the United States. 

In m.any of the rising cities of the eastern part of the country 
the first free schools established were Lancastrian schools. The 
system provided education at so low a cost (p. 629) that it made 
the education of all for the first time seem possible.^ llThe first 
free schools in Philadelphia (18 18) were an outgrowth of Lancas- 
trian influence, as was also the case in many other Pennsylvania 
cities. ^Baltimore began a Lancastrian school sLx years before the 
organization of public schools was permitted by law. A number 
of monitorial high schools were organized in different parts of the 
United States, and it was even proposed that the plan should be 
adopted in the colleges. A number of New England cities, that 
already had other type schools, investigated the new moni- 
torial plan and were impressed with its many important points 
of superiority over methods then in use. The Report of the 
Investigating Committee (1828) for Boston (R. 312), forms a 
good example of such. As in England, the system was very 
popular from about 1810 to 1830, but by 1840 its popularity 
was over. 

The interest the new plan awakened. It is not strange that the 
new plan aroused wddespread enthusiasm in many discerning men, 
and for almost a quarter of a century was advocated as the best 
system of education then known. Two quotations will illustrate 
what leading men of the time thought of it. De Witt Clinton, for 
twenty-one years president of the New York ''Free School Soci- 
ety," and later governor of the State, wrote, in 1809" 

' All at once, comparatively, a new system had been introduced which not only 
improved but tremendously cheapened education. In 1822 it cost but $1.22 per 
pupil per year to give instruction in New York City, though by 1844 the per-capita 
cost, due largely to the decreasing size of the classes, had risen to $2.70, and by 1852 
to $5.83. In Philadelphia, in 181 7, the expense was $3, as against $12 in the private 
and church schools. One finds many notices in the newspapers of the time as to 
the value and low cost of the new system. 



664 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

When I perceive that many boys in our school have been taught 
to read and write in two months, who did not before know the alphabet, 
and that even one has accomplished it in three weeks — when I view 
all the bearings and tendencies of this system — when I contemplate 
the habits of order which it forms, the spirit of emulation which it 
excites, the rapid improvement which it produces, the purity of morals 
which it inculcates — when I behold the extraordinary union of celer- 
ity in instruction and economy of expense — and when I perceive one 
great assembly of a thousand children, under the eye of a single 
teacher, marching with unexampled rapidity and with perfect disci- 
pline to the goal of knowledge, I confess that I recognize in Lancaster 
the benefactor of the human race. I consider his system as creating 
a new era in education, as a blessing sent down from heaven to redeem 
the poor and distressed of this world from the power and dominion of 
ignorance. 

In a message to the legislature of Connecticut, a State then 
fairly well supplied with schools of the Massachusetts district 
type, Governor Wolcott said, in 1825: 

If funds can be obtained to defray the expenses of the necessary 
preparations, I have no doubt that schools on the Lancastrian mode) 
ought, as soon as possible, to be established in several parts of this 
state. Wherever from 200 to 1000 children can be convened within a 
suitable distance, this mode of instruction in every branch of reading, 
speaking, penmanship, arithmetic, and bookkeeping, will be found 
much more efficient, direct, and economical than the practices now 
generally pursued in our primary schools. 

The Lancastrian schools materially hastened the adoption of 
the free school system in all the Northern States by gradually ac- 
customing people to bearing the necessary taxation which free 
schools entail. They also made the common school common and 
much talked of, and awakened thought and provoked discussion 
on the question of public education. They likewise dignified the 
work of the teacher by showing the necessity for teacher-training. 
The Lancastrian Model Schools, first established in the United^ 
States in 18 18, were the precursors of the American normal 
schools. 

Coming of the Infant School. A curious early condition in 
America was that, in some of the cities where public schools had 
been established, by one agency or another, no provision had been 
made for beginners. These were supposed to obtain the elements 
of readinr at home, or in the Dame Schools. In Boston, for ex- 
ample, where public schools were maintained by the city, no chil- 
dren could be received into the schools who had not learned to 
read and write (R. 314 a). This made the common age of ad- 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 



665 



mission somewhere near eight years. The same was in part true 
of Hartford, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities. 
When the monitorial schools were established they tended to re- 
strict their membership in a similar manner, though not always 
able to do so. 

In 1816 there came to America, also from England, a valuable 
supplement to educaiion as then known in the form of the so- 
called Infant Schools (p. 630). First introduced at Boston (R. 
313), the Infant Schools proved popular, and in 1818 the city ap- 
propriated $5000 for the purpose of organizing such schools to 
supplement the pubHc-school system. These were to admit 
children at four years of age, were to be known as primary schools, 
were to be taught by women, were to be open all the year round, 
and were to prepare the children for admission to the city schools, 
which by that time had come to 
be known as EngHsh grammar 
schools. Providence, similar- 
ly, established primary (In- 
fant) schools in 1828 for child- 
ren between the ages of four 
and eight, to supplement the 
work of the public schools, 
there called writing schools. 

The Dame School absorbed. 
For New England the estab- 
hshment of primary schools 
virtually took over the Dame 
School instruction as a pubhc 
function, and added the pri- 
mary grades to the previously 
existing school. We have here 
the origin of the division, often 
still retained at least in name 
in the Eastern States, of the 
"primary grades" and the 
"grammar grades" of the ele 
mentary school. 

An " Infant-School Society " 
was organized in New York, in 
1827. The first Infant School was established under the direction 
of the PubHc School Society as the "Junior Department" of 




Fig. 197 

"Model" School Building of the 

Public School Society 

Erected in 1843. Cost (with site), $17,000. 
A typical New York school building, after 
1830. The infant or primary school was on 
the first floor, the second floor contains the 
girls' school, and the third floor the boys' 
school. Each floor had one large room 
seating 252 children; the primary school- 
room could be divided into two rooms by 
folding doors, so as to segregate the infant 
class. This building was for long regarded 
as the perfection of the builder's art, and 
its picture was printed for years on the 
cover of the Society's Annual Reports. 



666 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



School No. 8, with a woman teacher in charge, and using moni- 
torial methods. A second school was estabhshed the next year. 
In 1830 the name was changed from Infant School to Primary De- 
partment, and where possible these departments were combined 
with the existing schools. In 1832 it was decided to organize ten 
primary schools, under women teachers, for children from four to 
ten years of age, and after the Boston plan of instruction. This 
abandoned the monitorial plan of instruction for the new Pesta- 
lozzian form, which was deemed better suited to the needs of the 
smaller children. By 1844 fifty-six Primary Departments had 
been organized in connection with the upper schools of the city. 

In Philadelphia three Infant-School Societies were founded in 
1827-28, and such schools were at once established there. By 
1830 the directors of the school system had been permitted by the 
legislature of the State to expend public money for such schools, 
and thirty such, under women teachers, were in operation in the 
city by 1837. 

Primary education organized. The Infant-School idea was 
soon somewhat generally adopted by the Eastern cities, and 



1700 



1800 



1830 



1860 



1890 




Fig. 198. Evolution of the Essential Features of the 
American Public School System 



changed somewhat to make of it an American primary school. 
Where children had not been previously admitted to the schools 
without knowing how to read, as in Boston, they supplemented 
the work of the public schools by adding a new school beneath. 
Where the reverse had been the case, as in New York City, the 
organization of Infant Schools as Junior Departments enabled the 
existing schools to advance their work. Everywhere it rer>ulted, 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 667 

eventually, in the organization of primary and grammar school 
departments, often with intermediate departments in between, 
and, with the somewhat contemporaneous evolution of the first 
high schools, the main outlines of the American free pubHc-school 
system were now complete. 

These four important educational movements — the secular 
Sunday School, the semi-pubKc city School Societies, the Lan- 
castrian plan for instruction, and the Lif ant-School idea — aU 
arising in philanthropy, came as successive educational ideas to 
America during the first half of the nineteenth century, supple- 
mented one another, and together accustomed a new generation 
to the idea of a common school for all. 

III. SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC INFLUENCES 

It is hardly probable, however, that these philanthropic efforts 
alone, valuable as they were, could have resulted in the great 
American battle for tax-supported schools, at as early a date as 
this took place, had they not been supplemented by a number of 
other movements of a social, political, and economic character 
which in themselves materially changed the nature and direction 
of our national life. The more important of these were: (i) The 
rise of cities and of manufacturing, (2) the extension of the suf- 
frage, and (3) the rise of new class-demands for schools. 

Growth of city population and manufacturing. At the time of 
the inauguration of the National Government nearly every one in 
America lived on the farm or in some little village. The first 
forty years of the national life were essentially an agricultural and 
a pioneer period. Even as late as 1820 there were but thirteen 
cities of 8000 inhabitants or over in the whole of the twenty-three 
States at that time comprising the Union, and these thirteen cities 
contained but 4.9 per cent of the total population of the Nation. 

After about 1825 these conditions began to change. By 1820 
many little villages were springing up, and these frequently 
proved the nuclei for future cities. In New England many of 
these places were in the vicinity of some waterfall, where cheap 
power made manufacturing on a large scale possible. Lowell, 
Massachusetts, which in 1820 did not exist and in 1840 had a 
population of over twenty thousand people, collected there 
largely to work in the mills, is a good illustration. Other cities, 
such as Cincinnati and Detroit, grew because of their advanta- 
geous situation as exchange and wholesale centers. With the 



668 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

revival of trade and commerce after the second war with Great 
Britain the cities grew rapidly both in number and size. 

The rise of the new cities and the rapid growth of the older ones 
materially changed the nature of the educational problem, by pro- 
ducing an entirely new set of social and educational conditions for 
the people of the Central and Northern States to solve. The 
South, with its plantation life, negro slavery, and absence of 
manufacturing was largely unaffected by these changed condi- 
tions until well after the close of the Civil War. In consequence 
the educational awakening there did not come for nearly half a 
century after it came in the North. In the cities in the coast 
States north of Maryland, but particularly in those of New York 
and New England, manufacturing developed very rapidly. Cot- 
ton-spinning in particular became a New England industry, as did 
also the weaving of wool, while Pennsylvania became the center 
of the iron manufacturing industries.^ 

The development of this new type of factory work meant the 
beginnings of the breakdown of the old home and village indus- 
tries, the eventual abandonment of the age-old apprenticeship 
system (Rs. 200, 201), the start of the cityward movement of the 
rural population, and the concentration of manufacturing in large 
establishments, employing many hands to perform continuously 
certain limited phases of the manufacturing process. This in 
time was certain to mean a change in educational methods. It 
also called for the concentration of both capital and labor. The 
rise of the factory system, business on a large scale, and cheap 
and rapid transportation, .11 combined to diminish the impor- 
tance of agriculture and to change the city from an ununportant to 
a very important position in our national life. The 13 cities of 
1820 increased to 44 by 1840, and to 141 by i860. There were 
four times as many cities in the North, too, where manufacturing 
had found a home, as in the South, which remained essentially 
agricultural. 

New social problems in the cities. The many changes in the 
nature of industry and of village and home life, effected by the 
development of the factory system and the concentration of man- 
ufacturing and population in the cities, also contributed materi- 

1 The cotton-spinning industry illustrates the rapid growth of manufacturing in 
the United States. The 15 cotton mills of 1807 had increased to 801, by 1831; and 
to 1240, by 1840. The South owed its prosperity chiefly to cotton-growing and 
shipping, and did not develop factories and workshops until a much more recent 
period. 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 669 

• 
ally in changing the character of the old educational problem. 
When the cities were as yet but little villages in size and charac- 
ter, homogeneous in their populations, and the many social and 
moral problems incident to the congestion of peoples of mixed 
character had not as yet arisen, the church and charity and pri- 
vate school solution of the educational problem was reasonably 
satisfactory. As the cities now increased rapidly in size, became 
more city-like in character, drew to them diverse elements pre- 
viously largely unknown, and were required by state laws to ex- 
tend the right of suffrage to all their citizens, the need for a new 
type of educational organization began slowly but clearly to mani- 
fest itself to an increasing number of citizens. The church, char- 
ity, and private school system completely broke down under the 
new strain. School Societies and Educational Associations, or- 
ganized for propaganda, now arose in the cities ; grants of city or 
state funds for the partial support of both church and society 
schools were demanded and obtained; and numbers of charity 
organizations began to be estabHshed in the different cities to en- 
able them to handle better the new problems of pauperism, in- 
temperance, and juvenile delinquency which arose. 

The extension of the sufifrage. The Constitution of the 
United States, though framed by the ablest men of the time, was 
framed by men who represented the old aristocratic conception of 
education and government. The same was true of the conven- 
tions which framed practically all the early state constitutions. 
The early period of the national life was thus characterized by the 
rule of a class — a very well-educated and a very capable class, to 
be sure — but a class elected by a ballot based on property quali- 
fications and belonging to the older type of poKtical and social 
thinking. 

Notwithstanding the statements of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, the change came but slowly. Up to 181 5 but four 
States had granted the right to vote to all male citizens, regard- 
less of property holdings or other somewhat similar restrictions. 
After 181 5 a democratic movement, which sought to abolish all 
class rule and all political inequalities, arose and rapidly gained 
strength. In this the new States to the westward, with their ab- 
sence of old estates or large fortunes, and where men were judged 
more on their merits than in an older society, were the leaders. 
As will be seen from the map, every new State admitted east of 
^e Mississippi River, except Ohio (admitted in 1802), where the 



670 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




states shaded grranted full suffrage 
at the time of admission to the Union • 



New England element predominated, and Louisiana (181 2), pro- 
vided for full manhood suffrage at the time of its admission to 

statehood. Seven ad- 
ditional Eastern States 
had extended the same 
full voting privileges 
to their citizens by 
1845, while the old re- 
quirements had been 
materially modified in 
most of the other 
Northern States. This 
democratic movement 
for the leveling of all 
class distinctions be- 
tween white men be- 
came very marked, 
after 1820; came to a 
head in the election 
of Andrew Jackson as 
President, in 1 8 28; and 
the final result was full 
manhood suffrage in 
all the States. This 
gave the farmer in the 
West and the new 
manufacturing classes in the cities a preponderating influence in 
the affairs of government. 

Educational significance of the extension of suffrage. Th^ 
educational significance of the extension of full manhood suffrage 
to all was enormous and far-reaching. 

There now took place in the United States, after about 1825, 
what took place in England after the passage of the Second Re- 
form Act (p. 642) of 1867. With the extension of the suffrage to 
aU classes of the population, poor as well as rich, laborer, as weU 
as employer, there came to thinking men, often for the first time, 
a realization that general education had become a fundamental 
necessity for the State, and that the general education of all in the 
elements of knowledge and civic virtue must now assume that 
importance in the minds of the leaders of the State that the edu- 
cation of a few for the service of the Church and of the many for 



Fig. 199. Dates OP the granting of 
Full Manhood Suffrage 

Some of the older States granted almost full man- 
hood suffrage at an earlier date, retaining a few minor 
restrictions until the date given on the map. States 
shaded granted full suffrage at the time of admission 
to the Union 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 671 

simple church membership had once held in the minds of ecclesi- 
astics. 

This new conception is well expressed in the preamble to the 
first (optional) school law enacted in Illinois (1825), which de- 
clares: 

To enjoy our rights and liberties, we must understand them; their 
security and protection ought to be the first object of a free people; 
and it is a well-established fact that no nation has ever continued long 
in the enjoyment of civil and political freedom, which was not both 
virtuous and enlightened; and believing that the advancement of liter- 
ature always has been, and ever will be the means of developing more 
fully the rights of man, that the mind of every citizen in a republic is 
the common property of society, and constitutes the basis of its 
strength and happiness; it is therefore considered the peculiar duty of 
a free government, like ours, to encourage and extend the improvement 
and cultivation of the intellectual energies of the whole. 

Utterances of public men and workingmen. Governors now 
began to recommend to their legislatures the establishment of 
tax-supported schools, and pubUc men began to urge state action 
and state control. An utterance by De Witt Clinton, for nine 
years governor of New York, may be taken as an example of 
many. In a message to the legislature, in 1826, defending the 
schools established, he said: 

The first duty of government, and the surest evidence of good 
government, is the encouragement of education. A general diffusion 
of knowledge is a precursor and protector of republican institutions, 
and in it we must confide as the conservative power that will watch 
over our liberties and guard them against fraud, intrigue, corruption, 
and violence. I consider the system of our common schools as the 
palladium of our freedom, for no reasonable apprehension can be 
entertained of its subversion as long as the great body of the people 
are enlightened by education. 

After about 1825 many labor unions were formed, and the rep- 
resentatives of these new organizations joined in the demands for 
schools and education, urgmg the free education of their children 
as a natural right. In 1829 the workingmen of Philadelphia asked 
each candidate for the legislature for a formal declaration of the 
attitude he would assume toward the provision of "an equal and a 
general system of education" for the State. In 1830 the Work- 
ingmen's Committee of Philadelphia submitted a detailed report 
(R. 315), after five months spent in investigating educational con- 
ditions in Pennsylvania, vigorously condemning the lack of pro- 
vision for education in the State, and the utterly inadequate pro- 



672 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

vision where any was made. Seth Luther, in an address on " The 
Education of Workingmen," delivered in 1832, declared that "a, 
large body of human beings are ruined by a neglect of education, 
rendered miserable in the extreme, and incapable of self-govern- 
ment." Stephen Simpson, in his A Manual for Workingmen, 
published in 1831, declared that "it is to education, therefore, 
that we must mainly look for redress of that perverted system 
of society, which dooms the producer to ignorance, to toil, and 
to penury, to moral degradation, physical want, and social bar- 
barism." Many resolutions were adopted by these organiza- 
tions demanding free state-supported schools.^ 

IV. ALIGNMENT OF INTERESTS, AND PROPAGANDA 

The alignment of interests. The second quarter of the nine- 
teenth century may be said to have witnessed the battle for tax- 
supported, publicly controlled and directed, and non-sectarian 
common schools. In 1825 such schools were still the distant hope 
of statesmen and reformers; in 1850 they had become an actuahty 
in almost every Northern State. The twenty-five years interven- 
ing marked a period of public agitation and educational propa- 
ganda; of many hard legislative fights; of a struggle to secure de- 
sired legislation, and then to hold what had been secured; of many 
bitter contests with church and private-school interests, which 
felt that their "vested rights" were being taken from them; and 
of occasional referenda in which the people were asked, at the 
next election, to advise the legislature as to what to do. Except- 
ing the battle for the aboHtion of slavery, perhaps no question has 
ever been before the American people for settlement which caused 
so much feeling or aroused such bitter antagonisms. The friends 
of free schools were at first commonly regarded as fanatics, dan- 
gerous to the State, and the opponents of free schools were con- 
sidered by them as old-time conservatives or as selfish members 
of society. 

Naturally such a bitter discussion of a public question forced an 
alignment of the people for or against publicly supported and 

' Among many resolutions adopted by the laboring organizations the following is 
typical: "At a General Meeting of Mechanics and Workingmen held in New York 
City, in 1829, it was 

"Resolved, that next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing 
bestowed upon mankind. 

"Resolved, that the public funds should be appropriated (to a reasonable extent) 
to the purpose of education upon a regular system that shall insure the opportunity 
to every individual of obtaining a competent education before he shall have arrived 
at the age of maturity." 



1 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 673 

controlled schools, and this alignment of interests may be roughly 
stated to have been about as follows: 

/. For Public Schools. 
Men considered as: 

1. " Citizens of the Republic." 

2. Philanthropists and humanitarians. 

3. PubHc men of large vision. 

4. City residents. 

5. The intelligent workingmen in the cities. 

6. Non-taxpayers. 

7. Calvinists. 

8. "New England men." 

//. Lukewarm, or against Public Schools. 
Men considered as: 

1. Belonging to the old aristocratic class. 

2. The conservatives of society. 

3. Politicians of small vision. 

4. Residents of rural districts. 

5. The ignorant, narrow-minded, and penurious. 

6. Taxpayers. 

7. Lutherans, Reformed-Church, Mennonites, and Quakers. 

8. Southern men. 

9. Proprietors of private schools. 

10. The non-English-speaking classes. 

The work of propaganda. To meet the arguments of the ob- 
jectors, to change the opinions of a thinking few into the common 
opinion of the many, to overcome prejudice, and to awaken the 
public conscience to the public need for free and common schools 
in such a democratic society, was the work of a generation. To 
convince the masses of the people that the scheme of state schools 
was not only practicable, but also the best and most economical 
means for giving their children the benefits of an education; to 
convince propertied citizens that taxation for education was in the 
interests of both public and private welfare; to convince legisla- 
tors that it was safe to vote for free-school bills ; and to overcome 
the opposition due to apathy, religious jealousies, and private in- 
terests, was the work of years. In time, though, the desirability 
of common, free, tax-supported, non-sectarian, state-controlled 
schools became evident to a majority of the citizens in the differ- 
ent American States, and as it did the American State School, 
free and equally open to all, was finally evolved and took its place 
as the most important institution in the national life working for 



674 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the perpetuation of a free democracy and the advancement of the 
public welfare. 

For this work of propaganda hundreds of School Societies and 
Educational Associations were organized; many conventions 
were held, and many resolutions favoring state schools were 
adopted; many "Letters" and "Addresses to the PubHc" were 
written and published; pubHc-spirited citizens traveled over the 
country, making addresses to the people explaining the advan- 
tages of free state schools; many pubHc-spirited men gave the best 
years of their lives to the state-school propaganda; and many gov- 
ernors sent communications on the subject to legislatures not yet 
convinced as to the desirability of state action. At each meeting 
of the legislatures for years a deluge of resolutions, memorials, 
and petitions for and against free schools met the members. 

The invention of the steam printing press came at about this 
time, and the first modern newspapers at a cheap price now ap- 
peared. These usually espoused progressive measures, and tre- 
mendously influenced public sentiment. Those not closely con- 
nected with church or private- school interests usually favored 
public tax-supported schools. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1 . Explain why the development of a national consciousness was practically 
necessary before an educational consciousness could be awakened. 

2. Show why it was natural, suffrage conditions considered, that the early 
interest should have been in advanced education. 

3. Why did the Sunday- School movement prove of so much less usefulness 
in America than in England? 

4. Show the analogy between the earlier school societies for educational 
work and other forms of modern associative effort. 

5. Explain the great popularity of the Lancastrian schools over those previ- 
ously common in America. 

6. What were two of the important contributions of the Infant-School idea 
to American education? 

7. Why are schools and education much more needed in a country experi- 
encing a city and manufacturing development than in a country experi- 
encing an agricultural development? 

8. Show how the development of cities caused the old forms of education to 
break down, and made evident the need for a new type of education. 

9. Show how each extension of the suffrage necessitates an extension of 
educational opportunities and advantages. 

10. Explain the ahgnment of each class, for or against tax-supported schoolSj 
on historical and on economic grounds. 



NEW INFLUENCES IN AMERICA 675 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following illustrative selec- 
tions are reproduced : 

307. Fowle: The Schools of Boston about 1790-1815. 

308. Rhode Island: Petition for Free Schools, 1799. 

309. Providence: Rules and Regulations for the Schools in 1820. 

310. Providence: A Memorial for Better Schools, 1837. 

311. Bourne: Beginnings of Public Education in New York City. 

312. Boston Report: Advantages of the Monitorial System. 

313. Wightman: Establishment of Primary Schools in Boston. 

314. Boston: The Elementary-School System in 1823. 

315. Philadelphia: Report of Workingmen's Committee on Schools. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Just what advantages for boys and for girls existed in Boston (307 a, b) 
before the creation of the reading schools? 

2. What improvements and additions did the reading schools (307 c) 
introduce? 

3. State the main features of the Rhode Island petition (308) of 1799. 

4. Just what kind of schools do the Providence regulations (309) of 1820 
provide for and describe? 

5. Despite the many advances made in public schools since the date of the 
Providence Memorial (310), have relative public and private school 
expenditures materially changed? 

6. Compare the New York Public School Society Address (311) with the 
English charity-school organization (237, 238) as to purpose and 
instruction. 

7. Show that a report on modern classroom organization would present 
advantages over the monitorial plan, comparable with those outlined by 
the Boston Report (312) comparing the monitorial and individual plans. 

8. Just what does the Boston Report on Primary Schools (313) reveal as 
to the character of education then provided? 

9. Just what kind of elementary schools did Boston have (314) in 1823? 
10. Just what kind of schools existed in the cities of Pennsylvania in 1830, 

judging from the Report (315) of the Workingmen's Committee? Was 
the Report correct with reference to "a monopoly of talent"? 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Binns, H. B. A Century of Education, 1808-IQ08. 
Boese, Thos. Public Education in the City of New York. 
Cubberley, E. P. Public Education in the United States. 
*Fitzpatrick, E. A. The Educational Views and Influences of De Witt 
Clinton. 
McManis, J. T. "The Public School Society of New York City"; in 

Educational Review, vol. 29, pp. 303-11. (March, 1905.) 
*Palmer, A. E. The New York Public School System. 
*Reigart, J. F. The Lancastrian System of Instruction in the Schools of 

New York City. 
*Salmon, David. Joseph Lancaster. 
*Simcoe, A. M. Social Forces in American History. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE STATE SCHOOLS 

The problem which confronted those interested in establishing 
state-controlled schools was not exactly the same in any two 
States, though the battle in many States possessed common ele- 
ments, and hence was somewhat similar in character. Instead 
of tracing the struggle in detail in each of the different States, it 
will be much more profitable for our purposes to pick out the 
main strategic points in the contest, and then illustrate the con- 
flict for these by describing conditions in one or two States where 
the controversy was most severe or most typical. The seven 
strategic points in the struggle for free, tax-supported, non-sec- 
tarian, state-controlled schools in the United States were: 

1. The battle for tax support. 

2. The battle to eliminate the pauper-school idea. 

3. The battle to make the schools entirely free. 

4. The battle to establish state supervision. 

5. The battle to eliminate sectarianism. 

6. The battle to extend the system upward. 

7. Addition of the state university to crown the system. 

We shall consider each of these, briefly, in order. 
I. THE BATTLE FOR TAX SUPPORT 

Early support and endowment funds. In New England, land 
endowments, local taxes, direct local appropriations, license taxes, 
and rate-bills had long been common. Land endowments began 
early in the New England Colonies, while rate-bills date back to 
the earliest times and long remained a favorite means of raising 
money for school support. These means were adopted in the 
different States after the beginning of our national period, and to 
them were added a variety of license taxes, while occupational 
taxes, lotteries, and bank taxes also were employed to raise money 
for schools. A few examples of these may be cited: 

Connecticut, in 1774, turned over all proceeds of liquor licenses 
to the towns where collected, to be used for schools. New Or- 
leans, in 1826, licensed two theaters on condition that they each 
pay $3000 annually for the support of schools in the city. New 
York, in 1799, authorized four state lotteries to raise $100,000 for 



J 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 677 

schools, a similar amount again in 1801, and numerous other lot- 
teries before 1810. New Jersey (R. 246) and most of the other 
States did the same. Congress passed fourteen joint resolutions, 
between 181 2 and 1836, authorizing lotteries to help support the 
schools of the city of Washington. Bank taxes were a favorite 
source of income for schools, between about 1825 and i860, banks 
being chartered on condition that they would pay over each year 
for schools a certain sum or percentage of their earnings. These 
all represent what is known as indirect taxation, and were val- 
uable in accustoming the people to the idea of public schools 
without appearing to tax cnem for their support. 

The National Land Grants, begun in the case of Ohio in 1802, 
soon stimulated a new interest in schools. Each State admitted 
after Ohio also received the sixteenth section for the support of 
common schools, and two townships of land for the endowment of 
a state university. The new Western States, following the lead 
of Ohio (R. 260) and Indiana (R. 261), dedicated these section 
lands and funds to free common schools. The sixteen older 
States, however, did not share in these grants, so most of them 
now set about building up a permanent school fund of their own, 
though at first without any ver}' clear idea as to how the income 
from the fund was to be used.^ 

The beginnings of school taxation. The early idea, which 
seems for a time to have been generally entertained, that the in- 
come from land grants, license fees, and these permanent endow- 
ment funds would in time entirely support the necessar}^ schools, 
was gradually abandoned as it was seen how little in yearly in- 
come these funds and lands really produced, and how rapidly the 
population of the States was increasing. By 1825 it may be said 
to have been clearly recognized by thinking men that the only 
safe reliance of a system of state schools lay in the general and di- 
rect taxation of all property for their support. "The wealth of 

^ Connecticut and New York both had set aside lands, before 1800, to create such 
a fund, Connecticut's fund dating back to 1750. Delaware, in 1796, devoted the 
income from marriage and tavern hcenses to the same purpose, but made no use of 
the fund for twenty years. Connecticut, in 179s, sold its "Western Reserve" in 
Ohio for $1,200,000, and added this to its school fund. New York, in 1805, similarly 
added the proceeds of the sale of half a million acres of state lands, though the fund 
then formally created accumulated unused until 181 2. Tennessee began to build 
up a permanent state school fund in 1806; Virginia in 1810; South Carolina in 1811; 
Maryland in 181 2; New Jersey in 1816; Georgia in 181 7; Maine, New Hampshire, 
Kentucky, and Louisiana in 182 1; Vermont and North Carolina in 1825; Pennsyl- 
vania in 1 831; and Massachusetts in 1834. These were established as permanent 
state funds, the annual income only to be used, in some way to be determined later, 
for the support of some form of sdiook. 



678 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



the State must educate the children of the State" became a 
watchword, and the battle for direct, local, county, and state 
taxation for education was clearly on by 1825 to 1830 in all the 
Northern States, except the four in New England where the prin- 
ciple of taxation for education had for long been estabhshed.^ 
Even in these States the struggle to increase taxation and provide 
better schools called for much argument and popular education 
(R. 316), and occasional backward movements (Rs. 317, 318) 
were encountered. 

The struggle to secure the first legislation, weak and ineffective 
as it seems to us to-day, was often hard and long. "Campaigns 

of education" had to be 
prepared for and carried 
through. Many thought 
that tax-supported schools 
would be dangerous for 
the State, harmful to in- 
dividual good, and thor- 
oughly undemocratic. 
Many did not see the need 
for schools at all. Por- 
tions of a town or a city 
would provide a free 
school, while other por- 
tions would not. Often 
those in favor of taxation 
were bitterly assailed, and even at times threatened with per- 
sonal violence. Often those in favor of improving the schook 
had to wait patiently for the opposition slowly to wear itself out 
(R. 319) before any real progress could be made. 

State support fixed the state system. With the beginnings of 
state aid in any substantial sums, either from the income from 
permanent endowment funds, state appropriations, or direct state 

1 Now for the first time direct taxation for schools was Hkely to be felt by the tax- 
payer, and the fight for and against the imposition of such taxation was on in earnest. 
The course of the struggle and the results were somewhat different in the different 
States, but, in a general way, the progress of the conflict was somewhat as follows: 

1. Permission granted to communities so desiring to organize a school taxing 
district, and to tax for school support the property of those consenting and 
residing therein. 

2. Taxation of all property in the taxing district permitted. 

3. State aid to such districts, at first from the income from permanent endowment 
funds, and later from the proceeds of a small state appropriation or a state or 
county tax. 

4. Compulsory local taxation to supplement the state or county grant. 




Fig. 200. The First Free Public 
School in Detroit 

A one-room school, opened in the Second Ward, 
in 1838. No action was taken in any other 
ward until 1842 



1 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 679 

taxation, the State became, for the first time, in a position to en- 
force quite definite requirements in many matters. Communi- 
ties which would not meet the State's requirements would receive 
no state funds. 

One of the first requirements to be thus enforced was that com- 
munities or districts receiving state aid must also levy a local tax 
for schools. Commonly the requirement was a duplication of 
state aid. Generally speaking, and recognizing exceptions in a 
few States, this represents the beginnings of compulsory local 
taxation for education. As early as 1797 Vermont had required 
the towns to support their schools on penalty of forfeiting their 
share of state aid. New York in 181 2, Delaware in 1829, and 
New Jersey in 1846 required a duplication of all state aid received. 
Wisconsin, in its first constitution of 1848, required a local tax for 
schools equal to one half the state aid received. The next step in 
state control was to add still other requirements, as a prerequisite 
to receiving state aid. One of the first of such was that a certain 
length of school term, commonly three months, must be provided 
in each school district. Another was the provision of free heat, 
and later on free schoolbooks and supplies. 

When the duplication-of-state-aid-received stage had been 
reached, compulsory local taxation for education had been estab- 
lished, and the great central battle for the creation of a state 
school system had been won. The right to tax for support, and to 
compel local taxation, w^as the key to the whole state system of 
education. From this point on the process of evolving an ade- 
quate system of school support in any State has been merely the 
further education of public opinion to see new educational needs, 

II. THE BATTLE TO ELIMINATE THE PAUPER-SCHOOL IDEA 

The pauper-school idea. The pauper-school idea was a direct 
inheritance from England, and its home in America was in the 
old Central and Southern Colonies, where the old Anglican 
Church had been in control. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Dela- 
ware, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia were the chief representa- 
tives, though the idea had friends among certain classes of the 
population in other of the older States. The new and democratic 
West would not tolerate it. The pauper-school conception was a 
direct inheritance from English rule, belonged to a society based 
on classes, and was wholly out of place in a Republic founded on 
the doctrine that "all men are created equal, and endowed by 



68o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

their Creator with certain unahenable rights." Still more, it was 
a very dangerous conception of education for a democratic form 
of government to tolerate or to foster. Its friends were found 
among the old aristocratic or conservative classes, the heavy tax- 
payers, the supporters of church schools, and the proprietors of 
private schools. Citizens who had caught the spirit of the new 
Republic, public men of large vision, intelligent workingmen, and 
men of the New England type of thinking were opposed on prin- 
ciple to a plan which drew such invidious distinctions between the 
future citizens of the State. To educate part of the children in 
church or private pay schools, they said, and to segregate those 
too poor to pay tuition and educate them at public expense in 
pauper schools, often with the brand of pauper made very evident 
to them, was certain to create classes in society which in time 
would prove a serious danger to our democratic institutions. 

Large numbers of those for whom the pauper schools were in- 
tended would not brand themselves as paupers by sending 
their children to the schools, and others who accepted the ad- 
vantages offered, for the sake of their children, despised the sys- 
tem.^ 

The battle for the elimination of the pauper-school idea was 
fought out in the North in the States of Pennsylvania and New 
Jersey, and the struggle in these two States we shall now briefly 
describe. 

The Pennsylvania legislation. In Pennsylvania we find the 
pauper-school idea fully developed. The constitution of 1790 
(R. 259) had provided for a state system of pauper schools, but 
nothing was done to carry even this constitutional direction 
into effect until 1802. A pauper- school law was then enacted, 
directing the overseers of the poor to notify such parents as 
they deemed sufficiently indigent that, if they would declare 
themselves to be paupers, their children might be sent to some 
specified private or pay school and be given free education (R. 
315). The expense for this was assessed against the education 

^ Concerning the system, "The Philadelphia Society for the Estabhshment and 
Support of Charity Schools," in an "Address to the Public," in 1818, said: 

"In the United States the benevolence of the inhabitants has led to the establish- 
ment of Charity Schools, which, though affording individual advantages, are not 
Ukely to be followed by the political benefits kindly contemplated by their founders. 
In the country a parent will raise children in ignorance rather than place them in 
charity schools. It is only in large cities that charity schools succeed to any extent. 
These dispositions may be improved to the best advantage, by the Legislature, in 
place of Charity Schools, estabhshing Public Schools for the education of all chil- 
dren, the offspring of the rich and the poor alike." 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 68i 

poor-fund, which was levied and collected in the same manner as 
were road taxes or taxes for poor relief. No provision was made 
for the establishment of public schools, even for the children of the 
poor, nor was any standard set for the education to be provided in 
the schools to which they were sent. No other general provision 
for elementary education was made in the State until 1834. 

With the growth of the cities, and the rise of their special prob- 
lems, something more than this very inadequate provision for 
schooling became necessary. "The Philadelphia Society for the 
Establishment and Support of Charity Schools" had long been 
urging a better system, and in 1814 "The Society for the Promo- 
tion of a Rational System of Education" was organized in Phila- 
delphia for the purpose of educational propaganda. Bills were 
prepared and pushed, and in 18 18 Philadelphia was permitted, by 
special law, to organize as "the first school district" in the State 
of Pennsylvania, and to provide, with its own funds, a system of 
Lancastrian schools for the education of the children of its poor.^ 

The Law of 1834. In 1827 "The Pennsylvania Society for the 
Promotion of Public Schools" began an educational propaganda 
which did much to bring about the Free-School Act of 1834. In 
an "Address to the Public" it declared its object to be the pro- 
motion of public education throughout the State of Pennsylvania, 
and the "Address" closed with these words: 

This Society is at present composed of about 250 members, and a 
correspondence has been commenced with 125 members, who reside in 
every district in the State. It is intended to direct the continued 
attention of the public to the importance of the subject ; to collect and 
diffuse all information which may be deemed valuable; and to per- 
severe in their labors until they shall be crowned with success. 

Memorials were presented to the legislature year after year, 
governors were interested, "Addresses to the Public" were pre- 
pared, and a vigorous propaganda was kept up until the Free- 
School Law of 1834 was the result. 

This law, though, was optional. It created every ward, town- 
ship, and borough in the State a school district, a total of 987 be- 
ing created for the State. Each school district was ordered to 
vote that autumn on the acceptance or rejection of the law. 
Those accepting the law were to organize under its provisions, 

1 In 182 1 the counties of Dauphin (Harrisburg), Allegheny (Pittsburg), Cumber- 
land (Carlisle) , and Lancaster (Lancaster) were also exempted from the state pauper- 
school law, and allowed to organize schools for the education of the children of their 
poor. 



682 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



while those rejecting the law were to continue under the educa- 
tional provisions of the old Pauper-School Act. 

The results of the school elections of 1834 are shown, by coun- 
ties, on the below map. Of the total of 987 districts created, 502, 
in 46 of the then 52 counties (Philadelphia County not voting), or 




I 1 to 20% IvivT?! 21 to 



81 to 100% 



Fig. 201. The Pennsylvania School Elections of 1835 

Showing the percentage of school districts in each county organizing 
under and accepting the School Law of 1834. Percentage of districts 
accepting indicated on the map for a few of the counties. 



52 per cent of the whole number, voted to accept the new law and 
organize under it; 264 districts, in 31 counties, or 27 per cent of the 
whole, voted definitely to reject the law; and 221 districts, in 46 
counties, or 21 per cent of the whole, refused to take any action 
either way. In 3 counties, indicated on the map, every district 
accepted the law, and in 5 counties, also indicated^ every district 
rejected or refused to act on the law. It was the predominantly 
German counties, located in the east-central portion of the State, 
which were strongest in their opposition to the new law. One 
reason for this was that the new law provided for English schools ; 
another was the objection of the thrifty Germans to taxation; 
and another was the fear that the new state schools might injure 
their German parochial schools. 

The real fight for free versus pauper schools, though, was yet 
to come. Legislators who had voted for the law were bitterly as- 
sailed, and, though it was but an optional law, the question of its 
repeal and the reinstatement of the old Pauper-School Law be- 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 683 

came the burning issue of the campaign in the autumn of 1834. 
Many legislators who had favored the law were defeated for re- 
election. Others, seeing defeat, refused to run. Petitions for the 
repeal of the law,^ and remonstrances against its repeal, flooded 
the legislature when it met. The Senate at once repealed tho 
law, but the House, largely under the leadership of a Vermonter 
by the name of Thaddeus Stevens,- refused to reconsider, and 
finally forced the Senate to accept an amended and a still 
stronger bill. This defeat finally settled, in principle at least, the 
pauper-school question in Pennsylvania,^ though it was not until 
1873 that the last district in the State accepted the new system. 

Eliminating the pauper-school idea in New Jersey. No con- 
stitutional mention of education was made in New Jersey until 
1844, and no educational legislation was passed until 1816. In 
that year a permanent state school fund was begun, and in 1820 
the first permission to levy taxes "for the education of such poor 
children as are paupers" was granted. In 1828 an extensive in- 
vestigation showed that one third of the children of the State 
were without educational opportunities, and as a result of this in- 
vestigation the first general school law for the State was enacted, 
in 1829. This provided for district schools, school trustees 
and visitation, licensed teachers, local taxation, and made a 
state appropriation of $20,000 a year to help establish the sys- 
tem. The next year, however, this law was repealed and the old 
pauper-school plan reestablished, largely due to the pressure of 
church and private-school interests. In 1830 and 1831 the state 
appropriation was made divisible among private and parochial 
schools, as well as the public pauper schools, and the use of all 
public money was limited "to the education of the children of the 
poor." 

Between 1828 and 1838 a number of conventions of friends of 
free public schools were held in the State, and much work in the 
nature of propaganda was done. At a convention in 1838 a com- 
mittee was appointed to prepare an "Address to the People of 
New Jersey" on the educational needs of the State (R. 320), and 

^ Some 32,000 persons petitioned for a repeal of the law, 66 of whom signed by 
making their mark, and "not more than five names in a hundred," reported a legis- 
lative committee which investigated the matter, "were signed in English script." 
It was from among the parochial-school Germans that the strongest opposition to 
the law came. 

■'' For Stevens's speech in defense of the Law of 1834, see Report of the United 
States Commissioner 0} Education, 1898-99, vol. i, pp. 516-24. 

* By 1836 the new free-school law had been accepted by 75 per cent of the districts 
in the State, by 1838 by 84 per cent, and by 1847 W 88 per cent. 



684 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

speakers were sent over the State to talk to the people on the sub- 
ject. The campaign against the pauper school had just been 
fought to a conclusion in Pennsylvania, and the result of the ap- 
peal in New Jersey was such a popular manifestation in favor of 
free schools that the legislature of 1838 instituted a partial state 
school system. The pauper-school laws were repealed, and the 
best features of the short-lived Law of 1829 were reenacted. In 
1844 a new state constitution limited the income of the perma- 
nent state school fund exclusively to the support of public schools. 
With the pauper-school idea eliminated from Pennsylvania and 
New Jersey, the North was through with it. The wisdom of its 
elimination soon became evident, and we hear little more of it 
among Northern people. The democratic West never tolerated 
it. It continued some time longer in Maryland, Virginia, and 
Georgia, and at places for a time in other Southern States, but 
finally disappeared in the South as well in the educational reop 
ganizations which took place following the close of the Civil War. 

III. THE BATTLE TO MAKE THE SCHOOLS ENTIRELY FREE 

The schools not yet free. The rate-bill, as we have previously 
stated, was an old institution, also brought over from England, as 
the term " rate " signifies. It was a charge levied upon the parent 
to supplement the school revenues and prolong the school term, 
and was assessed in proportion to the number of children sent by 
each parent to the school. In some States, as for example Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut, its use went back to colonial times; in 
others it was added as the cost for education increased, and it was 
seen that the income from permanent funds and authorized taxa- 
tion was not sufficient to maintain the school the necessary length 
of time. The deficiency in revenue was charged against the par- 
ents sending children to school, pro rata, and collected as ordi- 
nary tax-bills (R. 321). The charge was small, but it was suffi- 
cient to keep many poor children away from the schools. 

The rising cities, with their new social problems, could not and 
would not tolerate the rate-bill system, and one by one they se- 
cured special laws from legislatures which enabled them to organ- 
ize a city school system, separate from city-council control, and 
under a local ''board of education." One of the provisions of 
these special laws nearly always was the right to levy a city tax 
for schools sufficient to provide free education for the children of 
the city. 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 685 

The fight against the rate-bill in New York. The attempt to 
abolish the rate-bill and make the schools wholly free was most 
\rigorously contested in New York State, and the contest there is 
tnost easily described. From 1828 to 1868, this tax on the par- 
ents produced an average annual sum of $410,685.66, or about 
one half of the sum paid all the teachers of the State for salary. 
While the wealthy districts were securing special legislation and 







vctr::^- 



I I For Free Schools 

|.-.;. :. .. I Against Free Schools 
mmntH N. Y. C. & H. R. Ry. 



Fig. 202. The New York Referendum of 1850 

Total vote: For free schools, 17 counties and 209,346 voters; against 
free schools, 42 counties and 184,308 voters. 



taxing themselves to provide free schools for their children, the 
poorer and less populous districts were left to struggle to main- 
tain their schools the four months each year necessary to secure 
state aid. Finally, after much agitation, and a number of appeals 
to the legislature to assume the rate-bill charges in the form of 
general state taxation, and thus make the schools entirely free, 
the legislature, in 1849, referred the matter back to the people to 
be voted on at the elections that autumn. The legislature was to 
be thus advised by the people as to what action it should take. 



686 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The result was a state-wide campaign for free, public, tax-sup>- 
ported schools, as against partially free, rate-bill schools. 

The result of the 1849 election was a vote of 249,872 in favor of 
making "the property of the State educate the children of the 
State," and 91,952 against it. This only seemed to stir the op- 
ponents of free schools to renewed action, and they induced the 
next legislature to resubmit the question for another vote, in the 
autumn of 1850. 

The result of the referendum of 1850 is shown on the map on 
page 685. The opponents of tax-supported schools now mustered 
their full strength, doubling their vote in 1849, while the majority 
for free schools was materially cut down. The interesting thing 
shown on this map was the clear and unmistakable voice of the 
cities. They would not tolerate the rate-bill, and, despite their 
larger property interests, they favored tax-supported free schools. 
The rural districts, on the other hand, opposed the idea. 

The rate-bill in other States. These two referenda virtually 
settled the question in New York, though for a time a compro- 
mise was adopted. The state appropriation for schools was very 
materially increased, the rate-bill was retained, and the organiza- 
tion of "union districts" to provide free schools by local taxation 
where people desired them was authorized. Many of these 
"union free districts" now arose in the more progressive com- 
munities of the State, and finally, in 1867, after rural and other 
forms of opposition had largely subsided, and after almost all the 
older States had abandoned the plan, the New York legislature 
finally aboHshed the rate-bill and made the schools of New York 
entirely free. 

The dates for the abolition of the rate-bill in the other older 
Northern States were: 



1834. 


Pennsylvania. 


1867. 


New York. 


1852. 


Indiana. 


1868. 


Connecticut. 


1853. 


Ohio. 


1868. 


Rhode Island 


1855- 


Illinois. 


1869. 


Michigan. 


1864. 


Vermont. 


1871. 


New Jersey. 



The New York fight of 1849 ^^^ 1^5° was the pivotal fight; in the 
other States it was abandoned by legislative act, and without 
a serious contest. In the Southern States free education came 
with the educational reorganizations following the close of the 
Civil War. 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 687 



IV. THE BATTLE TO ESTABLISH SCHOOL SUPERVISION 

Beginnings of state control. The great battle for state schools 
was not only for taxation to stimulate their development where 
none existed, but was also indirectly a battle for some form of 
state control of the local systems which had already grown up. 
The establishment of permanent state school funds by the older 
States, to supplement any other aid which might be granted, also 
tended toward the establishment of some form of state supervi- 
sion and control of the local school systems. The first step was 
the establishment of some form of state aid; the next was the im- 
posing of conditions necessary to secure this state aid. 

State oversight and control, however, does not exercise itself, 
and it soon became evident that the States must elect or appoint 
some officer to represent the State and enforce the observance of 
its demands. It would be primarily his duty to see that the laws 
relating to schools were carried out, that statistics as to existing 
conditions were collected and printed, and that communities 
were properly advised as to their duties and the legislature as to 
the needs of the State. We find now the creation of a series of 
school officers to represent the State, the enactment of new laws 
extending control, and a struggle to integrate, subordinate, and 
reduce to some semblance of a state school system the hundreds 
of Kttle community school systems which had grown up. 

The first state school officers. The first American State to 
create a state officer to exercise supervision over its schools was 
New York, in 181 2. In enacting the new law ^ providing for state 
aid for schools the first State Superintendent of Common Schools 
in the United States was created. So far as is known this was a 
distinctively American creation, uninfluenced by the practice in 
any other land. It was to be the duty of this officer to look after 
the establishment and maintenance of the schools throughout the 
State. ^ Maryland created the office in 1826, but two years later 
abolished it and did not re-create it until 1864. Illinois directed 

^ This State had enacted an experimental school law, and made an annual state 
grant for schools, from 1795 to 1800. Then, unable to reenact the law, the system 
was allowed to lapse and was not reestablished until the New England element 
gained control, in 181 2. 

^ By his vigorous work in behalf of schools the first appointee, Gideon Hawley, 
gave such offense to the politicians of the time that he was removed from office, in 
1821, and the legislature then abolished the position and designated the Secretary 
of State to act, ex officio, as Superintendent. This condition continued until 1854, 
when New York again created the separate office of Superintendent of Public 
Instruction. 



688 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



its Secretary of State to act, ex officio, as Superintendent of 
Schools in 1825, as did also Vermont in 1827, Louisiana in 1833, 
Pennsylvania in 1834, and Tennessee in 1835. Illinois did not 
create a real State Superintendent of Schools, though, until 1854, 
Vermont until 1845, Louisiana until 1847, Pennsylvania until 
1857, or Tennessee until 1867. The first States to create separate 
school officials who have been continued to the present time were 
Michigan and Kentucky, both in 1837. Often quite a legislative 
struggle took place to secure the establishment of the office, and 
later on to prevent its aboKtion. 

By 1850 there were ex-officio state school officers in nine and 
regular school officers in seven of the then thirty-one States, and 




I I No Scliool Snperri.io. 

I;:;;J Hid » •i-oScio Sut« Sshool 
I I Had K YtgHlar SlBte Srhool Officer 

llllllll Had CouDlJ Sapexintandonti of SchooU 
fe^fta Had both StaU aAd CouDtr Srhool Offlrar 
• Cities haTiog a Cit; SuppT'oleDdeDt orSchooti 



Fig. 203. Status of School Supervision in the United States 

BY 1 86 1 

For a list of the 29 City Superintendencies established up to 1870, see 
Cubberley's Public School Administration, p. 58. For the history of the 
state educational office in each State see Cubberley and Elliott, State 
and County School Administration, Source Book, pp. 283-87. 

by 1 86 1 there were ex-officio officers in nine and regular officers in 
nineteen of the then thirty-four States, as well as one of each in 
two of the organized Territories. The above map shows the 
growth of supervisory oversight by 1 861 — forty-nine years from 
the time the first American state school officer was created. The 
map also shows the ten of the thirty-four States which had, by 
1 86 1, also created the office of County Superintendent of Schools, 
as well as the twenty-six cities which had, by 1861, created the 
office of City Superintendent of Schools. Only three more cities 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 689 

— Albany, Washington, and Kansas City — were added before 
1870, making a total of twenty-eight, but since that date the 
number of city superintendents has increased to something like 
fourteen hundred to-day. 

The first State Board of Education. Another important form 
for state control which was created a little later was the State 
Board of Education, with an appointed Secretary, who exercised 
about the same functions as a State Superintendent of Schools. 
This form of organization first arose in Massachusetts, in 1837, ^ 
an effort to subordinate the district schools and reduce them to a 
semblance of an organized system. In 1826 each town (town- 
ship) had been required to appoint a School Committee (School 
Board) to exercise general supervision over its schools, in 1834 the 
state permanent school fund was created, and in 1837 the reform 
movement reached its culmination in the creation of the first real 
State Board of Education in the United States. Instead of fol- 
lowing the usual American practice of the time, and providing for 
an elected State School Superintendent, Massachusetts provided 
for a small appointed State Board of Education which in turn 
was to select a Secretary, who was to act in the capacity of a state 
school officer and report to the Board, and through it to the legis- 
lature and the people. Neither the Board nor the Secretary were 
given any powers of compulsion, their work being to investigate 
conditions, report facts, expose defects, and make recommenda- 
tions as to action to the legislature. The permanence and influ- 
ence of the Board thus depended very largely on the character of 
the Secretary it selected. 

Horace Mann the first Secretary. A prominent Brown Univer- 
sity graduate and lawyer in the State Senate, by the name of 
Horace Mann (i 796-1859), who as president of the Senate had 
been of much assistance in securing passage of the bill creating the 
State Board of Education, was finally induced by the Governor 
and the Board to accept the position of Secretary. Mr. Mann 
now began a most memorable work of educating pubHc opinion, 
and soon became the acknowledged leader in school organization 
in the United States. State after State called upon him for ad- 
vice and counsel, while his twelve annual Reports to the State 
Board of Education will always remain memorable documents. 
PubHc men of all classes — lawyers, clergymen, college professors, 
Hterary men, teachers — were laid under tribute and sent forth 
over the State explaining to the people the need for a reawakening 



690 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

of educational interest in Massachusetts. Every year Mr. Mann 
organized a " campaign," to explain to the people the meaning and 
importance of general education. So successful was he, and so 
ripe was the time for such a movement, that he not only started a 
great common school revival in Massachusetts which led to the 
regeneration of the schools there, but one which was felt and 
which influenced development in every Northern State. 

His twelve carefully written Reports on the condition of educa- 
tion in Massachusetts and elsewhere, with his intelligent discus- 
sion of the aims and purposes of public education, occupy a com- 
manding place in the history of American education, while he 
will always be regarded as perhaps the greatest of the "founders" 
of our American system of free public schools. No one did more 
than he to estabhsh in the minds of the American people the con- 
ception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, and 
free, and that its aim should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and 
character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sec- 
tarian ends. Under his practical leadership an unorganized and 
heterogeneous series of community school systems was reduced to 
organization and welded together into a state school system, and 
the people of Massachusetts were effectively recalled to their an- 
cient belief in and duty toward the education of the people. 

Henry Barnard in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Ahnost 
equally important, though of a somewhat different character, 
was the work of Henry Barnard (1811-1900) in Connecticut and 
Rhode Island. A graduate of Yale, and also educated for the 
law, he turned aside to teach and became deeply interested in 
education. The years 1835-37 ^^ spent in Europe studying 
schools, particularly the work of Pestalozzi's disciples. On his 
return to America he was elected a member of the Connecticut 
legislature, and at once formulated and secured passage of the 
Connecticut law (1839) providing for a State Board of Commis- 
sioners for Common Schools, with a Secretary, after the Massa- 
chusetts plan. Mr. Barnard was then elected as its first Secre- 
tary, and reluctantly gave up the law and accepted the position at 
the munificent salary of $3 a day and expenses. Until the legis- 
lature abolished both the Board and the position, in 1842, he ren- 
dered for Connecticut a service scarcely less important than the 
better-known reforms which Horace Mann was at that time car- 
rying on in Massachusetts. 

In 1843 he was called to Rhode Island to examine and report 




ffi 




AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 691 

upon the existing schools, and from 1845 to 1849 acted as State 
Commissioner of PubHc Schools there, where he rendered a serv- 
ice similar to that previously rendered in Connecticut. In addi- 
tion he organized a series of town libraries throughout the State 
For his teachers' institutes he devised a traveling model school, to 
give demonstration lessons in the art of teaching. From 185 1 to 
1855 he was again in Connecticut, as principal of the newly estab- 
lished state normal school and ex-ojjicio Secretary of the Connec- 
ticut State Board of Education. He now rewrote the school 
laws, increased taxation for schools, checked the power of the dis- 
tricts, there known as "school societies," and laid the foundations 
of a state system of schools. The work of Mann and Barnard had 
its influence throughout all the Northern States, and encouraged 
the friends of education everywhere. Almost contemporaneous 
with them were leaders in other States who helped fight through 
the battles of state establishment and state organization and con- 
trol, and the period of their labors has since been termed the 
period of the ''great awakening." 

V. THE BATTLE TO ELIMINATE SECTARIANISM 

The secularization of American education. The Church, it 
will be remembered, was from the earliest colonial times in posses- 
sion of the education of the young. Not only were the earUest 
schools controlled by the Church and dominated by the religious 
motive, but the right of the Church to dictate the teaching in the 
schools was clearly recognized by the State. Still more, the State 
looked to the Church to provide the necessary education, and as- 
sisted it in doing so by donations of land and money. The minis- 
ter, as a town ofhcial, naturally examined the teachers and the in- 
struction in the schools. After the establishment of the National 
Government this relationship for a time continued.^ New York 
and the New England States specifically set aside lands to help 
both church and school. After about 1800 these land endow- 
ments for religion ceased, but grants of state aid for religious 
schools continued for nearly a half-century longer. Then it be- 
came common for a town or city to build a schoolhouse from city 
taxation, and let it out rent-free to any responsible person who 

^ When Connecticut sold its Western Reserve, in 1795, and added the sum to the 
Connecticut school fund, it was stated to be for the aid of "schools and the gospel." 
In the sales of the first national lands in Ohio (1,500,000 acres to The Ohio Company, 
in 1787; and 1,000,000 acres in the Symmes Purchase, near Cincinnati, in 1788), 
section 16 in each township was reserved and given as an endowment for schools, 
and section 29 "for the purposes of religion." 



692 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

would conduct a tuition school in it, with a few free places for se- 
lected poor children. Still later, with the rise of the state schools, 
it became quite common to take over church and private schools 
and aid them on the same basis as the new state schools. 

In colonial times, too, and for some decades into our national 
period, the warmest advocates of the estabHshment of schools 
were those who had in view the needs of the Church. Then grad- 
ually the emphasis shifted to the needs of the State, and a new 
class of advocates of public education now arose. Still later the 
jmphasis has been shifted to industrial and civic and national 
needs, and the religious aim has been almost completely elimi- 
nated. This change is known as the secularization of American 
education. It also required many a bitter struggle, and was ac- 
compHshed in the different States but slowly. The two great fac- 
tors which served to produce this change were: 

1. The conviction that the life of the Republic demanded an edu- 
cated and intelligent citizenship, and hence the general education 
of all in common schools controlled by the State ; and 

2. The great diversity of religious beliefs among the people, which 
forced tolerance and religious freedom through a consideration of 
the rights of minorities. 

The secularization of education must not be regarded either as a 
deliberate or a wanton violation of the rights of the Church, but 
rather as an unavoidable incident connected with the coming to 
self-consciousness and self-government of a great people. 

The fight in Massachusetts. The educational awakening in 
Massachusetts, brought on largely by the work of Horace Mann, 
was to many a rude awakening. Among other things, it re- 
vealed that the old school of the Puritans had gradually been re- 
placed by a new and purely American type of school, with instruc- 
tion adapted to democratic and national rather than reHgious 
ends. Mr. Mann stood strongly for such a conception of pubHc 
education, and being a Unitarian, and the new State Board of 
Education being almost entirely liberal in religion, an attack was 
launched against them, and for the first time in our history the 
cry was raised that *'The public schools are Godless schools." 
Those who beheved m the old system of religious instruction, 
those who bore the Board or its Secretary personal ill-will, and 
those who desired to break down the Board's authority and stop 
the development of the public schools, united their forces in thiy 
first big attack against secular education. Horace Mann was the 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 693 

first prominent educator in America to meet and answer the re- 
ligious onslaught. 

A violent attack was opened in both the pulpit and the press 
It was claimed that the Board was trying to eliminate the Bible 
from the schools, to abolish correction, and to "make the schools 
a counterpoise to religious instruction at home and in Sabbath 
schools." The local right to demand religious instruction was in- 
sisted upon. 

Mr. Mann felt that a great public issue had been raised which 
should be answered carefully and fully. In three public state- 
ments he answered the criticisms and pointed out the errors in the 
argument (R. 322). The Bible, he said, was an invaluable book 
for forming the character of children, and should be read without 
comment in the schools, but it was not necessary to teach it there. 
He showed that most of the towns had given up the teaching of the 
Catechism before the establisliment of the Board of Education. 
He contended that any attempt to decide what creed or doctrine 
should be taught would mean the ruin of the schools. The attack 
culminated in the attempts of the reHgious forces to aboUsh the 
State Board of Education, in the legislatures of 1840 and 1841, 
which failed dismally. Most of the orthodox people of the State 
took Mr. Mann's side, and Governor Briggs, in one of his mes- 
sages, commended his stand by inserting the following: 

Justice to a faithful public officer leads me to say that the inde- 
fatigable and accomplished Secretary of the Board of Education ha? 
performed services in the cause of common schools which will earn 
him the lasting gratitude of the generation to which he belongs. 

The attempt to divide the school funds. As was stated earher, 
in the beginning it was common to aid church schools on the same 
basis as the state schools, and sometimes, in the beginnings of 
state aid, the money was distributed among existing schools with- 
out at first establishing any public schools. In many Eastern 
cities church schools at first shared in the pubHc funds. In Penn- 
sylvania church and private schools were aided from poor-law 
funds up to 1834. In New Jersey the first general school law of 
1829 had been repealed a year later through the united efforts of 
church and private-school interests, who unitedly fought the de- 
velopment of state schools, and in 1830 and 1831 new laws had 
permitted all private and parochial schools to share in the small 
state appropriation for education. 

After the beginning of the forties, when the Roman Catholic in- 



694 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

fluence came in strongly with the increase in Irish immigration to 
the United States, a new factor was introduced and the problem, 
which had previously been a Protestant problem, took on a some- 
what different aspect in the form of a demand for a division of the 
school funds. Between 1825 and 1842 the fight was especially 
severe in New York City. In 1825 the City Council refused to 
grant pubHc money to any religious Societ}',^ and in 1840 the 
Catholics carried the matter to the State Legislature. 

The legislature deferred action until 1842, and then did the un- 
expected thing. The heated discussion of the question in the city 
and in the legislature had made it evident that, while it might not 
be desirable to continue to give funds to a privately organized 
corporation, to divide them among the quarreling and envious re- 
ligious sects would be much worse. The result was that the legis- 
lature created for the city a City Board of Education, to establish 
real public schools, and stopped the debate on the question of aid 
to religious schools by enacting that no portion of the school 
funds was in the future to be given to any school in which ''any 
religious sectarian doctrine or tenet should be taught, inculcated, 
or practiced." Thus the real public-school system of New York 
City was evolved out of this attempt to divide the public funds 
among the churches. The PubHc School Society continued for a 
time, but its work was now done, and, in 1853, it surrendered its 
buildings and property to the City Board of Education and dis- 
banded. 

The contest in other States. As early as 1830, Lowell, Massa- 
chusetts, had granted aid to the Irish Catholic parochial schools 
in the city, and in 1835 had taken over two such schools and 
maintained them as public schools. In 1853 the representatives 
of the Roman Catholic Church made a demand on the state legis- 
lature for a division of the school fund of the State. To settle the 
question once for all a constitutional amendment was submitted 
by the legislature to the people, providing that all state and town 
moneys raised or appropriated for education must be expended 
only on regularly organized and conducted public schools, and. 
that no religious sect should ever share in such funds. This 
measure failed of adoption at the election of 1853 by a vote of 

^ The Public School Society continued to receive money grants, it being regarded 
as a non-denominational organization, though chartered to teach "the subHme 
truths of religion and morality contained in the Holy Scriptures" in its schools. In 
1828 the Society was even permitted to levy a local tax to supplement its resources, 
it being estimated that at that time there were 10,000 children in the city with no 
opportunities for education. 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 695 

65,111 for and 65,512 against, but was re-proposed and adopted 
in 1855. This settled the question in Massachusetts, as Mann 
had tried to settle it earlier, and as New Hampshire had settled it 
in its constitution of 1792, Connecticut in its constitution of 1818, 
and Rhode Island in its constitution of 1842. 

Other States now faced similar demands, but no demand for a 
share in or a division of the public-school funds, after 1840, was 
successful. The demand everywhere met with intense opposi- 
tion, and with the coming of enormous numbers of Irish CathoKcs 
after 1846, and German Lutherans after 1848, the question of the 
preservation of the schools just established as unified state school 
systems now became a burning one. Petitions for a division of 
the funds deluged the legislatures (R. 323), and these were met by 
counter-petitions (R. 324). Mass meetings on both sides of the 
question were held. Candidates for office were forced to declare 
themselves. Anti-CathoHc riots occurred in a number of cities. 
The Native- American Party was formed, in 184 1, " to prevent the 
union of Church and State," and to "keep the Bible in the 
schools." In 1841 the Whig Party, in New York, inserted a 
plank in its platform against sectarian schools. In 1855 the na- 
tional council of the Know-No thing Party, meeting in Philadel- 
phia, in its platform favored public schools and the use of the 
Bible therein, but opposed sectarian schools. This party carried 
the elections that year in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Con- 
necticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Kentucky. 

To settle the question in a final manner legislatures now began 
to propose constitutional amendments to the people of their sev- 
eral States which forbade a division or a diversion of the funds, 
and these were almost uniformly adopted at the first election after 
being proposed. No State admitted to the Union after 1858, ex- 
cept West Virginia, failed to insert such a provision in its first state 
constitition.^ 

VI. THE BATTLE TO ESTABLISH THE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL 

The elementary or common schools which had been established 
in the different States, by 1850, suppHed an elementar}' or com- 
mon school education to the children of the masses of the people, 

^ The question may be regarded as a settled one in our American States. Our 
people mean to keep the public-school system united as one state school system, well 
realizing that any attempt to divide the schools among the different religious de- 
nominations (the Wr^rld Almanac for 19 17 lists 49 different denominations and 171 
different sects in the United States) could only lead to inefficiency and educational 
chaos. 



696 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and the primary schools which were added, after about 1820, car- 
ried this education downward to the needs of the beginners. In 
the rural schools the American school of the 3 Rs provided for all 
the children, from the little ones up, so long as they could ad- 
vantageously partake of its instruction. Education in advance 
of this common school training was in semi-private institutions — 
the academies and colleges — in which a tuition fee was charged. 
The next struggle came in the attempt to extend the system up- 
ward so as to provide to pupils, free of charge, a more complete 
education than the common schools afforded. 

The transition Academy. About the middle of the eighteenth 
century a tendency manifested itself, in Europe as well as in 
America, to establish higher schools offering a more practical 

curriculum than the old Latin 
schools had provided. In Amer- 
ica it became particularly evident, 
after the coming of nationality, 
that the old Latin grammar- 
school type of instruction, with 
its hmited curriculum and exclu- 
sively college-preparatory ends, 
was wholly inadequate for the 
needs of the youth of the land. 
The result was the gradual dying • 
Fig. 204. A Typical New ^^^ ^^ ^^^ Latin school and the 

England Academy evolution of the tuition Acad 

Pittsfield Academy, New Hampshire, emy, previously referred to briefly 

on page 463. 
The academy movement spread rapidly during the first half of 
the nineteenth century. By 1800 there were 17 academies in 
Massachusetts, 36 by 1820, and 403 by 1850. By 1830 there 
were, according to Hinsdale, 950 incorporated academies in the 
United States, and many unincorporated ones, and by 1850, ac- 
cording to Inglis, there were, of all kinds, 1007 academies in New 
England, 1636 in the Middle Atlantic States, 2640 in the Southern 
States, 753 in the Upper Mississippi Valley States, and a total re- 
ported for the entire United States of 6085, with 12,260 teachers 
employed and 263,096 pupils enrolled.^ The greatest period of 

^ The movement gained a firm hold everywhere east of the Missouri River, the 
States incorporating the largest number being New York with 887, Pennsylvania 
with 524, Massachusetts with 403, Kentucky with 330, Virginia with 317, North 
Carolina with 272, and Tennessee with 264. Some States, as Kentucky and Indian^ 




AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 697 

their development was from 1820 to 1830, though they continued 
to dominate secondary education until 1850, and were very promi- 
nent until after the Civil War. 

Characteristic features. The most characteristic features of 
these academies were their semi-public control (R. 325), their 
broadened curriculum and religious purpose, and the extension of 
their instruction to girls. The Latin Grammar School was essen- 
tially a town free school, maintained by the towns for the higher 
education of certain of their male children. It was aristocratic in 
type, and belonged to the early period of class education. With 
the decline in zeal for education, after 1750, these tax-supported 
higher schools largely died out, and in their place private energy 
and benevolence came to be depended upon to supply the needed 
higher education. 

One of the main purposes expressed in the endowment or crea- 
tion of the academies was the establishment of courses which 
should cover a number of subjects having value aside from mere 
preparation for college, particularly subjects of a modem nature, 
■.useful in preparing youths for the changed conditions of society 
:and government and business. The study of real things rather 
than words about things, and useful things rather than subjects 
jnerely preparatory to college, became prominent features of the 
new courses of study. Among the most commonly found new 
subjects were algebra, astronomy, botany, chemistry, general his- 
tory, United States history, English literature, surveying, intellec- 
tual philosophy, declamation, and debating.^ 

Not being bound up with the colleges, as the earlier Latin gram- 
mar schools had largely been, the academies became primarily 
independent institutions, taking pupils who had completed the 
English education of the common school and giving them an ad- 
vanced education in modern languages, the sciences, mathemat- 
ics, history, and the more useful subjects of the time, with a view 
to "rounding out" their studies and preparing them for business 

provided for a system of county academies, while many States extended to them 
some form of state aid. In New York State they found a warm advocate in Gover- 
nor De Witt Clinton, who urged (1827) that they be located at the county towns 
of the State to give a practical scientific education suited to the wants of farmers, 
merchants, and mechanics, and also to train teachers for the schools of the State. 
1 The new emphasis given to the study of English, mathematics, and book- 
science is noticeable. New subjects appeared in proportion as the academies in- 
creased in numbers and importance. Of 149 new subjects for study appearing in the 
academies of New York, between 1787 and 1870, 23 appeared before 1826, 100 be- 
tween 1826 and 1840, and 26 after 1840. Between 1825 and 1828 one half of the 
new subjects appeared. This also was the maximum period of development of the 
academies. 



698 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

life and the rising professions. They thus built upon instead of 
running parallel to the common school course, as the old Latin 
grammar school had done (see Figure 198, p. 666) and hence clearly 
mark a transition from the aristocratic and somewhat exclusive 
college-preparatory Latin grammar school of colonial times to the 
more democratic high school of to-day. The academies also 
served a very useful purpose in supplying to the lower schools the 
best-educated teachers of the time. 

The old Latin grammar school, too, had been maintained 
exclusively for boys. Girls had been excluded as " Improper & 
inconsistent w^^ such a Grammar Schoole as y^ law injoines, and 
is y^ Designe of this Settlem^." The new academies soon reversed 
this situation. Almost from the first they began to be estabHshed 
for girls as well as boys, and in time many became co-educational. 
In New York State alone 32 academies were incorporated between 
1819 and 1853 with the prefix "Female" to their title. In this 
respect, also, these institutions formed a transition to the modern 
co-educational high school. The higher education of women in 
the United States clearly dates from the establishment of the 
academies. Troy (New York) Seminary, founded by Emma 
Willard, in 182 1, and Mt. Holyoke (Massachusetts) Seminary, 
founded by Mary Lyon, in 1836, though not the first institutions 
for girls, were nevertheless important pioneers in the higher educa- 
tion of women. 

The demand for higher schools. The different movements 
tending toward the building-up of free pubHc-school systems in the 
cities and States, which we have described in this and the preced- 
ing chapter, and which became clearly defined in the Northern 
States after 1825, came just at the time when the Academy had 
reached its maximum development. The settlement of the ques- 
tion of general taxation for education, the elimination of the rate- 
bill by the cities and later by the States, the estabHshment of the 
American common school as the result of a long native evolution, 
and the complete establishment of pubHc control over the entire 
elementary-school system, all tended to bring the semi-private 
tuition academy into question. Many asked why not extend the 
public-school system upward to provide the necessary higher edu- 
cation for all in one common state-supported school.^ 

^ The existence of a number of colleges, basing their entrance requirements on 
the completion of the classical course of the academy, and the establishment of a 
few embryo state universities in the new States of the West and the South, naturally 
raised the further question of why there should be a gap in the public-school sys- 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 699 

The demand for an upward extension of the pubHc school, 
which would provide academy instruction for the poor as well as 
the rich, and in one common public higher school, now made itself 
felt. As the colonial Latin grammar school had represented the 



]] The Latin Grammar School 
y////\ The Tuition Academy 

The Free Public High School 

(Proportional heights indicate estimated 
relative development) 




21000 



18000 



15000 



9000 



6000 



3000 



.^^rr-'^'f/V'T^^^ '^Me^w/y//////. 



1900 1930 



1630 1660 1700 1750 1800 1850 

Fig. 205. The Development of Secondary Schools in the United 

States 
The transitional character of the Academy is well shown in this diagram. 

educational needs of a society based on classes, and the academies 
had represented a transition period and marked the growth of a 
middle class, so the rising democracy of the second quarter of the 
nineteenth century now demanded and obtained the democratic 
high school, supported by the public and equally open to all, to 
meet the educational needs of a new society built on the basis of 
a new and aggressive democracy. Where, too, the academy had 
represented in a way a missionary effort — that of a few provid- 
ing something for the good of the people (Rs. 319, 325) — the 
high school on the other hand represented a cooperative effort 
on the part of the people to provide something for themselves. 

The first American high school. The first high school in the 
United States was established in Boston, in 1821 (R. 326). For 
three years it was known as the ''English Classical School" 

tem. The increase of wealth in the cities tended to increase the number who passed 
through the elementary course and could profit by more extended education; the 
academies had popularized the idea of more advanced education; while the new 
manufacturing and commercial activities of the time called for more training than 
the elementary schools afforded, and of a dififerent type from that demanded by the 
small colleges of the time for entrance. 



700 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 206 
The First High School in 

THE United States 
Established at Boston in 1821 



(R. 327), but in 1824 the school appears in the records as the 
"Enghsh High School." In 1826 Boston also opened the first 
high school for girls, but abolished it in 
1828, due to its great popularity, and 
instead extended the course of study for 
girls in the elementary schools. 

The Massachusetts Law of 1827. 
Though Portland, Maine, established a 
high school in 1821, Worcester, Massa- 
chusetts, in 1824, and New Bedford, 
Haverhill, and Salem, Massachusetts, in 
1827, copying the Boston idea, the real 
beginning of the American high school 
as a distinct institution dates from the 
Massachusetts Law of 1827 (R. 328), 
enacted through the influence of James 
G. Carter, This law formed the basis 
of all subsequent legislation in Massa- 
chusetts, and deeply influenced development in other States. 
The law is significant in that it required a high school in every 
town having 500 famiHes or over, in which should be taught 
United States history, bookkeeping, algebra, geometry, and sur- 
veying, while in every town having 4000 inhabitants or over, 
instruction in Greek, Latin, history, rhetoric, and logic must be 
added. A heavy penalty was attached for failure to comply 
with the law. In 1835 the law was amended so as to permit any 
smaller town to form a high school as well. 

This Boston and Massachusetts legislation clearly initiated the 
public high-school movement in the United States. It was there 
that the new type of higher school was founded, there that its 
curriculum was outUned, there that its standards were estabhshed, 
and there that it developed earliest and best. 

The struggle to establish and maintain high schools. The 
development of the American high school, even in its home, was 
slow. Up to 1840 not much more than a dozen high schools had 
been established in Massachusetts, and not more than an equal 
number in the other States. The Academy was the dominant 
institution, the cost of maintenance was a factor, and the same 
opposition to an extension of taxation to include high schools was 
manifested as was earlier shown toward the establishment of com- 
mon schools. The early state legislation, as had been the case 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 701 

vvith the common schools, was nearly always permissive and not 
mandatory. Massachusetts forms a notable exception in this 
regard. The support for the schools had to come practically 
entirely from increased local taxation, and this made the struggle 
to estabhsh and maintain high schools in any State for a long time 
a series of local struggles. Years of propaganda and patient effort 
were required, and, after the establishment of a high school in a 
community, constant watchfulness was necessary to prevent its 
abandonment (R. 329). 

In many States, legislation providing for the establishment of 
high schools was attacked in the courts. One of the clearest cases 



[/£; 




^ J> 


( 


\ ■ •• 


V ' •'• '6 y^ ^/^^-^^---~^ — '^''\-'J^'" 1 


) 


\ . A 


/'• " ' 'r^ xfM • .'.'l^^^ 1 


\ Y ■:' 


^ 


High Schools 


\ 


1 \j 


^ 




in 1860 



Fig. 207. High Schools in the United States by i860 

Based on the table given in the Report of the United States Commissioner 
of Education, 1904, vol. 11, pp. 1782-1989. This table is only approxi- 
mately correct, as exact information is difficult to obtain. This table 
gives 321 high schools by i860, and all but 35 of these were in the 
States shown on the above map. There were two schools in California 
and three in Texas, and the remainder not shown were in the Southern 
States. Of the 321 high schools reported, over half (167) were in the 
three States of Massachusetts (78), New York (41), and Ohio (48). 



of this came in Michigan, in a test case appealed from the city of 
Kalamazoo, and commonly known as the Kalamazoo case. The 
opinion of the Supreme Court of the State (R. 330) was so favor- 
able and so positive that this decision deeply influenced develop- 
ment in almost all of the Upper Mississippi Valley States, 
The struggle to establish and maintain high schools in Massa- 



702 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

chusetts and New York preceded the development in most other 
States, because there the common school had been established 
earlier. In consequence, the struggle to extend and complete the 
public-school system came there earlier also. The development 
was likewise more peaceful there, and came more rapidly. Ir 
Massachusetts this was in large part a result of the educational 
awakening started by James G. Carter and Horace Mann. In 
New York it was due to the early support of Governor De Witt 
Clinton, and the later encouragement and state aid which came 
from the Regents of the University of the State of New York. 
Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire were like Massachusetts 
in spirit, and followed closely its example. In Rhode Island and 
New Jersey, due to old conditions, and in Connecticut, due to the 
great decline in education there after 1800, the high school devel- 
oped much more slowly, and it was not until after 1865 that any 
marked development took place in these States. The democratic 
West soon adopted the idea, and established high schools as soon 
as cities developed and the needs of the population warranted. 
In the South the main high-school development dates from rela- 
tively recent times. 

Gradually the high school has been accepted as a part of the 
state common-school system by all the American States, and the 
funds and taxation originally provided for the common schools 
have been extended to cover the high school as well. The new 
States of the West have based their legislation largely on what 
the Eastern and Central States earlier fought out. 

VII. THE STATE UNIVERSITY CROWNS THE SYSTEM 

The colonial colleges. The earlier colleges — Harvard, William 
and Mary, Yale — had been created by the religious-state govern- 
ments of the earlier colonial period, and continued to retain some 
state connections for a time after the coming of nationality. As 
it early became evident that a democracy demands intelhgence 
on the part of its citizens, that the leaders of democracy are not 
likely to be too highly educated, and that the character of collegi- 
ate instruction must ultimately influence national development, 
efforts were accordingly made to change the old colleges or create 
new ones, the final outcome of which was the creation of state 
universities in all the new and in most of the older States. The 
evolution of the state university, as the crowning head of the free 
pubHc school system of the State, represents the last phase which 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 703 

we shall trace of the struggle of democracy to create a system of 
schools suited to its peculiar needs. 

The close of the colonial period found the Colonies possessed of 
nine colleges. These, with the dates of their foundation, the Col- 
ony founding them, and the religious denomination they chiefly 
represented were : 



1636. 


Harvard College 


Massachusetts 


Puritan 


1693. 


William and Mary 


Virginia 


Anglican 


I70I. 


Yale College 


Connecticut 


Congregational 


1746. 


Princeton 


New Jersey 


Presbyterian 


1753-55- 


Academy and College 


Pennsylvania 


Non-denominational 


1754- 


King's College (Columbia) 


New York 


Anglican 


1764. 


Brown 


Rhode Island 


Baptist 


1766. 


Rutgers 


New Jersey 


Reformed Dutch 


1769. 


Dartmouth 


New Hampshirf 


; Congregational 



The religious purpose had been dominant in the founding of 
each institution, though there was a gradual shading-off in strict 
denominational control and insistence upon religious conformity 
in the foundations after 1750. Still the prime purpose in the 
founding of each was to train up a learned and godly body of min- 
isters, the earlier congregations at least "dreading to leave an 
illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers 
shall lie in the dust." In a pamphlet, published in 1754, Presi- 
dent Clap of Yale declared that "Colleges are Societies of Minis- 
ters, for training up Persons for the Work of the Ministry,'^ and 
that "The great design of founding this School (Yale), was to 
Educate Ministers in our own Way." In the advertisement pub- 
lished in the New York papers announcing the opening of King's 
College, in 1754, it was stated that: 

IV. The chief Thing that is aimed at in this College, is, to teach ancj 
engage the Children to know God in Jesus Christ, and to love and serve 
him in all Sobriety, Godliness, and Richness of Life, with a perfect Heart 
and a Willing Mind: and to train them up in all Virtuous Habits, and 
all such useful Knowledge as may render them creditable to their 
Families and Friends, Ornaments to their Country, and useful to the 
Public Weal in their generation. 

These colonial institutions were all small. For the first fifty 
years of Harvard's history the attendance at the college seldom 
exceeded twenty, and the President did all the teaching. The 
first assistant teacher (tutor) was not appointed until 1699, and 
the first pre lessor not until 1721, when a professorship of divinity 
was endowed. By 1800 the instruction was conducted by the 
President and three professors — divinity, mathematics, and 



704 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



"Oriental languages" — assisted by a few tutors who received 
only class fees, and the graduating classes seldom exceeded forty. 
The course was four years in length, and all students studied the 
same subjects. The first three years were given largely to the 
so-called "Oriental languages" — Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. 
In addition, Freshmen studied arithmetic; Sophomores, algebra, 
geometry, and trigonometry; and Juniors, natural (book) science; 
and all were given much training in oratory, and some general 
history was added. The Senior year was given mainly to ethics, 
philosophy, and Christian evidences.-^ The instruction in the 
eight other older colleges, before 1800, was not materially different. 
Growth of colleges by i860. Fifteen additional colleges were 
founded before 1800, and it has been estimated that by that date 
the two dozen American colleges then existing did not have all 
told over one hundred professors and instructors, not less than 




+ Colonia.I Colleges 
•Colleges founded. 1775-1860 

(Mostly Denomina^tional) 
O Stzite Universities. 



Fig. 208. Colleges and Universities established by i860 

Compiled from data given in the Reports of the United States Commissioner of Edu- 
cation. Of the 246 colleges shown on the map, but 17 were state institutions, and 
but two or three others had any state connections. 



one thousand nor more than two thousand students, or property 
worth over one million dollars. Their graduating classes were 
small. No one of the twenty-four admitted women in any way 
to its privileges. After 1820, with the firmer establishment of the 

1 For an interesting table showing the simple entrance requirements of Harvard 
in 1642, 1734, 1803, 1825, 1850, 1875, and 1885, see Report of the United States 
Commissioner of Education, 1902, vol. I, pp. 930-33. 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 705 

Nation, the awakening of a new national consciousness, the devel- 
opment of larger national wealth, and a court decision (p. 706) 
which safeguarded the endowments, interest in the founding of 
new colleges perceptibly quickened, as may be seen from the 
adjoining table, and between 1820 and 1880 came the great period 
of denominational effort. The map shows the colleges established 
by i860, from which it will be seen how large a part the denomi- 
national colleges played in the early history of higher education 
in the United States. Up to about 1870 the provision of higher 
education, as had been the case earher with the provision of 
secondary education by the acade- 
mies, had been left largely to private lygo-gg ' 

effort. There were, to be sure, a 1790-99 7 

few state universities before 1870, 1800-09 9 

th'ough usually these were not better 18^^29 22 

than the denominational colleges 1830-39 38 

around them, and often they main- 1840-49 42 

tained a non-denominational char- 155^50 2^ 

acter only by preserving a proper 1870-79 61 

balance between the different de- 1880-89 74 

nominations in the employment of ^ ^°"^^ -^- 

their faculties. Speaking generally, 

, . , 1 ^. • ^1 TT -i 1 Oi ^ Colleges FOUNDED UP TO iQoo 

higher education m the United States 

, - „ • 1 1 (After a table by Dexter, corrected 

before 1870 was provided very by U.S.Comr. Educ.data. Onlyap- 

largely in the tuitional colleges of P^'^i^^ateiy correct.) 
the different religious denominations, rather than by the State. 
Of the 246 colleges founded by the close of the year i860, as shown 
on the map, but 1 7 were state institutions, and but two or three 
others had any state connections. 

The new national attitude toward the colleges. After the com- 
ing of nationality there gradually grew up a widespread dissatis- 
faction with the colleges as then conducted, because they were 
aristocratic in tendency, because they devoted themselves so 
exclusively to the needs of a class, and because they failed to 
answer the needs of the States in the matter of higher education. 
Due to their religious origin, and the common requirement that 
the president and trustees must be members of some particular 
denomination, they were naturally regarded as representing the 
interests of some one sect or faction within the State rather than 
the interests of the State itself. With the rise of the new demo- 
cratic spirit after about 1820 there came a demand, felt least in 



706 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

New England and most in the South and the new States in the 
West, for institutions of higher learning which should represent 
the State. It was argued that colleges were important instru- 
mentalities for moulding the future, that the kind of education 
given in them must ultimately influence the welfare of the State, 
and that higher education cannot be regarded as a private matter. 
The type of education given in these higher institutions, it was 
argued, "will appear on the bench, at the bar, in the pulpit, and 
in the senate, and will unavoidably affect our civil and rehgious 
principles." For these reasons, as well as to crown our state 
school system and to provide higher educational advantages for 
its leaders, it was argued that the State should exercise control 
over the colleges. 

This new national spirit manifested itself in a number of ways. 
In New York we see it in the reorganization of King's College, 
the rechristening of the institution as Columbia, and the placing 
of it under at least the nominal supervision of the governing edu- 
cational body of the State. In Pennsylvania an attempt was 
made to bring the university into closer connection with the 
State, but this failed. In New Hampshire the legislature tried, 
in 1816, to transform Dartmouth College into a state institution. 
This act was contested in the courts, and the case was finally 
carried to the Supreme Court of the United States. There it was 
decided, in 18 19, that the charter of a college was a contract, the 
obligation of which a legislature could not impair. 

Effect of the Dartmouth College decision. The effect of this 
decision manifested itself in two different ways. On the one hand 
it guaranteed the perpetuity of endowments, and the great period 
of private and denominational effort (see table, p. 705) now fol- 
lowed. On the other hand, since the States could not change 
charters and transform old establishments, they began to turn 
to the creation of new state universities of their own. Virginia 
created its state university the same year as the Dartmouth case 
decision. The University of North Carolina, which had been 
estabhshed in 1789, and which began to give instruction in 1795, 
but which had never been under direct state control, was taken 
over by the State in 182 1. The University of Vermont, originally 
chartered in 1791, was rechartered as a state university in 1838. 
The University of Indiana was estabhshed in 1820. Alabama 
provided for a state university in its first constitution, in 1819, 
and the institution opened for instruction in 1831. Michigan, in 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 707 

framing its first constitution preparatory to entering the Union, 
in 1835, made careful provisions for the safeguarding of the state 
university and for establishing it as an integral part of its state 
school system, as Indiana had done in 1816. Wisconsin provided 
for the creation of a state university in 1836, and embodied the 
idea in its first constitution when it entered the Union in 1848, 
and Missouri provided for a state university in 1839, Mississippi 
in 1844, Iowa in 1847, ^^^ Florida in 1856. The state univers ity/ 
is to-day found ineve iy " new " State and i n some of_the^^^riginal ' \ 
States, and practically every new Western and Southern State \ 
followed the patterns set by Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin^ 
and made careful provision for the establishment and maintenance^ 
of a state university in its first state constitution. 

There was thus quietly added another new section to the 
American educational ladder, and the free public-school system 
was extended farther upward. Though the great period of state 
university foundation came after i860, and the great period of 
state university expansion after 1885, the beginnings were clearly 
marked early in our national history. Of the sixteen States having 
state universities by i860 (see Figure 208), all except Florida had 
established them before 1850. For a long time small, poorly sup- 
ported by the States, much like the church colleges about them in 
character and often inferior in quahty, one by one the state univer- 
sities have freed themselves alike from denominational restric- 
tions on the one hand and political control on the other, and have 
set about rendering the service to the State which a state univer- 
sity ought to render. Michigan, the first of our state universities 
to free itself, take its proper place, and set an example for others 
to follow, opened in 1841 with two professors and six students. 
In 1844 it was a little institution of three professors, one tutor, 
one assistant, and one visiting lecturer, had but fifty-three stu- 
dents, and offered but a single course of study, consisting chiefly 
of Greek, Latin, mathematics, and intellectual and moral science 
(R. 331). As late as 1852 it had but seventy- two students, but 
by i860, when it had largely freed itseh from the incubus of 
Baptist Latin, Congregational Greek, Methodist intellectual 
philosophy, Presbyterian astronomy, and Whig mathematics, 
and its remarkable growth as a state university had begun, it 
enrolled five hundred and nineteen. 

The American free public-school system now established. By 
the close of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, certainly 



7o8 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



by i860, we find the American public-school system fully estab- 
lished, in principle at least, in all our Northern States (R. 332), 
Much yet remained to be done to carry into full effect what had 

been established in principle, but 
everywhere democracy had won 
its fight, and the American pub- 
lic school, supported by general 
taxation, freed from the pauper- 
school taint, free and equally open 
to all, under the direction of rep- 
resentatives of the people, free 
from sectarian control, and com- 
plete from the primary school 
through the high school, and in 
the Western States through the 
university as well, was estab- 
lished permanently in American 
public pohcy. It was a real dem- 
ocratic educational ladder that 
had been created, and not the 
typical two-class school system of 
continental European States. The 
establishment of the free public 
high school and the state uni- 
versity represent the crowning 
achievements of those who strug- 
gled to found a state-supported 
educational system fitted to the 
needs of great democratic States. 
Probably no other influences have 
done more to unify the Amer- 
ican people, reconcile diverse 
points of view, eliminate state 
jealousies, set ideals for the peo- 
ple, and train leaders for the serv- 
ice of the States and of the Nation than the academies, high 
schools, and colleges scattered over the land. They have edu- 
cated but a small percentage of the people, to be sure, but they 
have trained most of the leaders who have guided the American 
democracy since its birth. 



1 

X. 

w 

■< 

J3 

!iO 

W 
> 

8 

< 

u 

5 
c 

<tt 

s - 


n 


ni 






SENIOR 






\ 












A 






SOPHOMORE • 1 












FRESHMAN • ' 






M' 






TWELFTH GRADE 










ELEVENTH GRADE • 


' 




1 




, TENTH GRADE • 


J 


1 




. NINTH GRADE 




1 


J 


EIGHTH GRADE 'H | 




1 


SEVENTH GRADE • I 




J 


, SIXTH GRADE 


Si 




3 


FIFTH GRADE Ml 1 




J 




FOURTH GRADE ' 


1 


. THIRD GRADE 


S 


\ 




SECOND GRADE 


ll 


FIRST GRADE " I 


J ul 



Fig. 209. The American 

Educational Ladder 

Compare this with the figure on page 
577, and the democratic nature of the 
American school system will be ap- 
parent. 



AMERICAN BATTLE FOR FREE SCHOOLS 709 



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Explain the theory of "vested rights " as applied to private and parochial 
schools. 

2. Does every great advance in provisions for human welfare require a 
period of education and propaganda? Illustrate. 

3. Explain just what is meant by "the wealth of the State must educate 
the children of the State." 

4. Show how the retention of the pauper-school idea would have been 
dangerous to the life of the Republic. 

5. Why were the cities more anxious to escape from the operation of the 
pauper-school law than were the towns and rural districts? 

6. Why were the pauper-school and the rate-bill so hard to eliminate? 

7. Explain why, in America, schools naturally developed from the com- 
munity outward. 

8. State your explanation for the older States beginning to establish per- 
manent school funds, often before they had established a state system 
of schools. 

9. Show the gradual transition from church control of education, through 
state aid of church schools, to secularized state schools. 

10. Show why secularized state schools were the only possible solution for 
the United States. 

11. Show that secularization would naturally take place in the textbooks 
and the instruction, before manifesting itself in the laws. 

12. Show how the American academy was a natural development in the 
national life. 

13. Show how the American high school was a natural development after 
the academy. 

14. Show why the high school could be opposed by men who had accepted 
tax-supported elementary schools. Why has such reasoning been aban- 
doned now? 

15. Explain the difference, and illustrate from the history of American edu- 
cational development, between estabhshing a thing in principle and carry- 
ing it into full effect. 

16. Was the early argument as to the influence of higher education on the 
State a true argument? Why? 

17. What would have been the probable results had the Dartmouth College 
case been decided the other way? 

18. Show how the opening of collegiate instruction to women was a phase 
of the new democratic movement. 

19. Show how college education has been a unifying force in the national life. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following illustrative selections 
are reproduced: 

316. Mann: The Ground of the Free-School Sj'stem. 

317. Governor Cleveland: Repeal of the Connecticut School Law. 

318. Mann: On the Repeal of the Connecticut School Law. 

319. Gulliver: The Struggle for Free Schools in Norwich. 

320. Address: The State and Education. 

321. Michigan: A Rate-Bill, and a Warrant for Collection. 

322. Mann: On Religious Instruction in the Schools. 

323. Michigan: Petition for a Division of the School Fund. 



7IO HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

324. Michigan: Counter-Petition against a Division. 

325. Connecticut: Act of Incorporation of Norwich Free Academy. 

326. Boston: EstabHshment of the First American High School. 

327. Boston: The Secondary-School System in 1823. 

328. Massachusetts: The High School Law of 1827. 

329. Gulliver: An Example of the Opposition to High Schools. 

330. Michigan: The Kalamazoo Decision. 

331. Michigan: Program of Studies at University, 1843. 

332. Tappan: The Michigan State System of Pubhc Instruction. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

I. Do Mann's three propositions (316) hold equally true to-day? 
?. Of ^dlat type of person is the reasoning of Governor Cleveland (317) 
typical? 

3. Assuming Mann's description of Connecticut progress (318) to be cor- 
rect, how do you account for the legislature following Governor Cleve- 
land's recommendations so readily? 

4. Did the leaders in Norwich (319) use good diplomacy? 

5. Point out the essential soundness cf the reasoning of the New Jersey 
Report (320). 

6. Explain the willingness of people seventy-five years ago to conduct the 
school business on such a small basis (321) as the rate-bill indicates. 

7. Show that, as Mr. Mann points out (322), sectarian schools and a State 
Church are near together. 

8. Point out the weakness in the argument in the Michigan petition (323). 

9. State the purpose and nature of the first American high school (326), 
and contrast it with the earlier academy. 

10. Contrast the English Classical School (High School) of Boston of 1823, 
with the older Latin School (327), as to purpose and instruction. 

11. Just what did the Massachusetts Law of 1827 (328) require? 

12. Has such opposition as that described in 329 completely died out even 
now? 

13. State the line of reasoning and the conclusions of the Court in the Kala- 
mazoo Case (330). Point out how this decision might influence develop- 
ment elsewhere. 

14. Compare the University of Michigan of 1843 (331) with a present-daj 
high school. 

15. Show that Michigan (332) had perfected an American educational 
ladder. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Brown, E. E. The Making of our Middle Schools. 
*Brown, S. W. The Secularization of American Education. 
Cubberley, E. P. Public Education in the United States. 
Dexter, E. G. A History of Education in the United States. 
*Hinsdale, B. A. Horace Mann, and the Common School Revival in the 

United States. 
*Inglis, A. J. The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts. 
Martin, George H. The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School 
System. 
*Mead, A. R. The Development of Free Schools in the United States, as 
Illustrated by Connecticut and Michigan. 
Taylor, James M. Before Vassar Opened. 
*Thwing, Charles F. A History of Higher Education in America. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 

I. SPREAD OF THE STATE-CONTROL IDEA 

The five type nations. We have now traced, in some detail, 
the struggles of forward-looking men to establish national sys- 
tems of education in five great world nations. In each we have 
described the steps by means of which the State gradually super- 
seded the Church in the control of education, and the motives 
and impulses which finally led the State to take over the school as 
a function of the State. The steps and impelHng motives and 
rate of transfer were not the same in any two nations, but in each 
of the five the poHtical necessities of the State in time made the 
transfer seem desirable. Time everywhere was required to effect 
the change. The movement began earliest and was concluded 
earliest in the German States, and was concluded last in England. 
In the German States, France, and Italy the change came rapidly 
and as a result of legislative acts or imperial decrees. In England 
and the United States the transfer took place, as we have seen, 
only in response to the slow development of public opinion. 

This change in control and extension of educational advantages 
was essentially a nineteenth-century movement, and a resultant 
of the new political philosophy and the democratic revolutions of 
the later eighteenth century, combined with the industrial revo- 
lution of the nineteenth century. A new political impulse now 
replaced the earlier religious motive as the incentive for education, 
and education for literacy and citizenship became, during the 
nineteenth century, a new political ideal that has, in time, spread 
to progressive nations all over the world. 

The five great nations whose educational evolution has been 
described in the preceding chapters may be regarded as having 
formed types which have since been copied, in more or less detail, 
by the more progressive nations in different parts of the world. 
The continental European two-class school system, the American 
educational ladder, and the English tendency to combine the two 
and use the best parts of each, have been reproduced in the differ- 
ent national educational systems which have been created by the 
various political governments of the world. The continental 



712 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

European idea of a centralized ministry for education, with an 
appointed head or a cabinet minister in control, has also been 
widely copied. The Prussian two-class plan has been most influ- 
ential among the Teutonic and Slavic peoples of Europe, and has 
also deeply influenced educational development among the Jap- 
anese; English ideas have been extensively copied in the EngUsh 
self-governing dominions; and the American plan has been clearly 
influential in Canada, the Argentine, and in China. The French 
centralized plan for organization and administration has been 
widely copied in the state educational organizations of the Latin 
nations of Europe and South America. In a general way it may 
be stated that the more democratic the government of a nation 
has become the greater has been the tendency to break away 
from the two-class school system, to introduce more of an educa- 
tional ladder, and to bring in more of the English conception of 
granting to localities a reasonable amount of local liberty in edu- 
cational affairs. 

Spread of the state-control idea among northern nations. The 
development of schools under the control of the government, and 
the extension of state supervision to the existing religious schools, 
took place in the dififerent cantons of Switzerland, and in Holland, 
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, somewhat contemporaneously 
with the development described for the five type nations. The 
work of Pestalozzi and Fellenberg, and of their disciples and fol- 
lowers, had given an early impetus to the establishment of schools 
and teacher- training in the Swiss cantons, most being done in the 
German-speaking portions. 

In Holland, where the Reformation zeal for schools largely died 
out in the eighteenth century, the organization of the ''Society 
of Public Good," in 1784, by a Mennonite clergyman, did much 
to awaken a new interest in schools for the people and to inaugu- 
rate a new movement for educational organization. In 1795 a 
revolution took place in Holland, a republic was established, and 
the extension of educational advantages followed. From 1806 
to 181 5 Holland was under the rule of Napoleon. A school law 
of 1806 forms the basis of public education in Holland. This 
asserted the supremacy of the State in education, and provided 
for state inspection of schools. In 181 2 the French scientist, 
M. Cuvier, reported to Napoleon that there were 4451 schools 
in little Holland, and that one tenth of the total population was 
in school. In 1816 a normal school was established at Haarlem. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 713 



22 



21 



20 



'■'/p~:wA 




16 



13 



< 12 



Transfer Point 



ax, 

aim 



W 
^ 



i 






Both the constitutions of 181 5 and 1848 provided for state con- 
trol of education, which has been steadily extended since the 
beginning of the revival in 1784. To-day Holland provides a 
good system of public instruction for its people. 

In Denmark and Sweden the development of state schools has 
been worked out, much as in England, in cooperation with the 
Church, and the Church still assists the State in the admin- 
istration and supervision of the 
school systems which were event- 
ually evolved. In each of these 
countries, too, the continental 
two-class school system has been 
somewhat modified by an upward 
movement of the transfer point 
between the two and the develop- 
ment of people's high schools, so 
as to produce a more democratic 
type of school and afford better 
educational opportunities to all 
classes of the population. The an- 
nexed diagram, showing the organ- 
ization of education in Denmark, 
is typical of this modification and 
extension. 

Finland should also be classed 
with these northern nations in 
matters of educational develop- 
ment. Lutheran ideas as to reli- 
gion and the need for education 
took deep hold there at an early 
date (p. 297), A knowledge of 
reading and the Catechism was made necessary for confirmation 
as early as 1686, and democratic ideas also found an early home 
among this people. In consequence the Finns have for long 
been a Hterate people. The law making elementary education 
a function of the State, however, dates only from 1866, and 
secondary education was taken over from the ecclesiastical au- 
thorities only in 1872. 

Similarly, Scotland, another northern nation, began schools as 
a phase of its Reformation fervor. During the eighteenth cen- 
tury the parish schools, created by the Acts of 1646 (R. 179; 



e 10 



Fig. 210. The School System 
OF Denmark 



714 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



p. 335) and 1696, proved insufficient, and voluntary schools were 
added to supplement them. Together these insured for Scotland 
a much higher degree of literacy than was the case in England. 
The final state organization of education in Scotland dates from 
the Scottish Education Act of 1872. 

The map reproduced here, showing the progress of general 
education by the close of the nineteenth century, as measured by 




Fig. 211. The Progress of Literacy in Europe by the Close of the 
Nineteenth Century 

the spread of the ability to read and write, reveals at a glance the 
high degree of literacy of the northern Teutonic and mixed Teu- 
tonic nations. It was among these nations that the Protestant 
Reformation ideas made the deepest impression; it was in these 
northern States that the Protestant elementary vernacular school, 
to teach reading and religion, attained its earliest start; it was 
there that the school was taken over from the Church and erected 
into an effective national instrument at an early date ; and it was 
these nations which had been most successful, by the close of the 
nineteenth century, in extending the elements of education to all 
and thus producing literate populations. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 715 

The state-control idea in the south and east of Europe. As we 
pass to the south and east of Europe we pass not only to lands 
which remained loyal to the Roman Church, or are adherents of 
the Greek Church, and hence did not experience the Reformation 
fervor with its accompanying zeal for education, but also to lands 
untouched by the French-Revolution movement and where 
democratic ideas have only recently begun to make any progress. 
Greece alone forms an exception to this statement, a constitu- 
tional government having been established there in 1843. Re- 
moved from the main stream of European civilization, these 
nations have been influenced less by modern forces ; the hold of 
the Church on the education of the young has there been longest 
retained; and the taking-over of education by the State has there 
been longest deferred. In consequence, the schools provided 
have for long been inadequate both in number and scope, and the 
progress of literacy and democratic ideas among the people has 
been slow. 

Despite the beginnings made by Maria Theresa (p. 475) in the 
late eighteenth century, Austria dropped backward to a low place 
in matters of education during the period of reaction following 
the Napoleonic wars, and the real beginnings of state elementary- 
schools there date from the law of 1867. The beginnings in Hun- 
gary date from 1868. The beginnings of other state elementary 
school systems are: Greece, 1823; Portugal, 1844; Spain, 1857; 
Roumania, 1859; Bulgaria, 1881; and Serbia, 1882. In many of 
these States, despite early beginnings, but little real progress 
has even yet been made in developing systems of national educa- 
tion that will provide gratuitous elementary-school training for all 
and inculcate the national spirit. In many of these States the 
illiteracy of the people is still high,^ the people are poor, the na- 
tions are economically backward, the military and clerical classes 
still dominate, and intelligent and interested governments have 
not as yet been evolved. 

In Russia, though Catherine II (p. 477) and her successors 
made earnest efforts to begin a system of state education, the 
period following Napoleon was one of extreme repressive reaction. 

^ In Spain, for example, the percentage of illiteracy in i860 was 75.52; in 1870 
70.01 per cent; in 1887, 68.01 per cent; in 1890, 63.78 per cent; and in 1910, 59.35 
per cent. The percentage for 1920 will probably not be less than for 1910, due to 
the closing of many schools for lack of teachers during the World War. In 19 16 
ten provinces had an illiteracy of over 70 per cent, and but five had less than 40 per 
cent. In Madrid and Barcelona, cities as large as Baltimore and Cleveland, the 
illiteracy approaches a third of the population in Madrid, and a half in Barcelona. 



716 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

The military class and the clergy of the Greek Church joined 
hands in a government interested in keeping the people submis- 
sive and devout. In consequence, at the time of the emancipa- 
tion of the serfs, in 1861, it was estimated that not one per cent 
of the total population of Russia was then under instruction, and 
the ratio of illiteracy by the close of the nineteenth century was 
the highest in Europe outside of Spain, Portugal, and the Balkan 
States, 

The state-control idea in the English self-governing dominions. 
The English and French settlers in Ontario, Quebec, and the 
Maritime Provinces of Canada brought the English and French 
parochial-school ideas from their home-lands with them, but 
these home conceptions were materially modified, at an early 
date, by settlers from the northern States of the American Union. 
These introduced the New England idea of state control and 
pubHc responsibility for education. In part copying precedents 
recently established in the new American States, as an outcome 
of the struggles there to establish free, tax-supported, and state- 
controlled schools, both Ontario and Quebec early began the 
establishment of state systems of education for their people. A 
superintendent of education was appointed in Ontario in 1844, 
and the Common School Act of 1846 laid the foundation of the 
state school system of the Province. In the law of 187 1 a system 
of uniform, free, compulsory, and state-inspected schools was 
definitely provided for. Quebec, in 1845, made the ecclesiastical 
parish the unit for school administration; in 1852 appointed 
government inspectors for the church schools; and in 1859 pro- 
vided for a Council of Public Instruction to control all schools in 
the Province, The Dominion Act of 1867 left education, as in 
the United States, to the several Provinces to control, and state 
systems of education, though with large liberty in religious in- 
struction, or the incorporation of the religious schools into the 
state school systems, have since been erected in all the Canadian 
Provinces. Following American precedents, too, a thoroughly 
democratic educational ladder has almost everywhere been cre- 
ated, substantially like that shown in the Figure on page 708. 

In AustraHa and New Zealand education has similarly been 
left to the different States to handle, but a state centralized con- 
trol has been provided there which is more akin to French practice 
than to English ideas. In each State, primary education has been 
made free, compulsory, secular, and state-supported. The laws 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 717 

making such provision in the different States date from 1872, in 
Victoria; 1875, in Queensland; 1878, in South Australia, West 
Australia, and New Zealand; and 1880, in New South Wales. 
Secondary education has not as yet been made free, and many 
excellent privately endowed or fee-supported secondary schools, 
after the Enghsh plan, are found in the different States. 

In the new Union of South Africa all university education has 
been taken over by the Union, while the existing school systems 
of the different States are rapidly being taken over and expanded 
by the state governments, and transformed into constructive 
instruments of the States. 

The state-control idea in the South American States. As we 
have seen in Chapter xx, the spirit of nationality awakened by 
the French Revolution spread to South America, and between 
181 5 and 182 1 (p. 503) all of Spain's South American colonies re- 
volted, declared their independence from the mother country, 
and set up constitutional republics. Brazil, in 1822, in a similar 
manner severed its connections from Portugal. The United 
States, through the Monroe Doctrine (1823), helped these new 
States to maintain their independence. For approximately half 
a century these States, isolated as they were and engaged in a 
long and difficult struggle to evolve stable forms of govern- 
ment, left such education as was provided to private individ- 
uals and societies and to the missionaries and teaching orders 
of the Roman Church. After the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the new forces stirring in the modem world began to be 
felt in South America as well, and, after about 1870, a well- 
defined movement to establish state school systems began to be 
in evidence. 

The Argentine constitution of 1853 had directed the establish- 
ment of primary schools by the State, but nothing of importance 
was done until after the election of Dr. Sarmiento as President, in 
1868. Under his influence an American-type normal school was 
established, teachers were imported from the United States, and 
liberal appropriations for education were begun. In 1873 ^ 
general system of national aid for primary education was estab- 
Hshed, and in 1884 a new law laid the basis of the present state 
school system. Though some earher beginnings had been made 
in some of the other South American nations, Argentine is re- 
garded as the leader in education among them. This is largely 
due to the democratic nature of the government which, in connec- 



7i8 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



ft 



■mz± 



d 



m 



20 



19 



13 



tion with the deep interest in education of President Sarmiento,^ 
found educational expression in the creation of an American-type 
educational ladder, as the accompanying diagram shows. Large 
emphasis has been placed on scientific and practical studies in 
the secondary colegios. The normal school has been given large 

importance, and made a parallel 
and connecting link in the edu- 
cational ladder between the prim- 
ary schools and the universities. 
The Argentine school system, 
probably due to American influ- 
ences acting through President 
Sarmiento, forms an exception to 
the usual South American state 
school system, as nearly all the 
other States have followed the 
French model and created a Eu- 
ropean two-class school system. 

In Chili, the constitution of 
1833 declared education to be of 
supreme importance, and a nor- 
mal school was established in 
Santiago, as early as 1840. The 
basic law for the organization of 
a state system of primary instruc- 
tion, however, dates from i860, 
and the law organizing a state 
system of secondary and higher 
education from 1872. 

In Peru, an educational reform 
movement was inaugurated in 
1876, but the war with Chili (1879-84) checked all progress. In 
1896 an Educational Commission was appointed to visit the 
United States and Europe, and the law of 1901 marked the crea- 
tion of a ministry for education and the real beginnings of a state 
school system. 

1 While an exile from the Argentine, Dr. Sarmiento was commissioned by Chili to 
visit, study, and report on the state school systems of the United States and Europe. 
While in the United States he became intimately acquainted with Horace Mann. 
Later he was Minister from the Argentine to the United States, being recalled, in 1868, 
to assume the presidency of the Republic. He was deeply impressed with the type of 
educational opportunity provided in the schools of the United States and, through an 
appointed Minister of Education, impressed his ideas on the Argentine nation. 



Fig. 212. The School System of 
THE Argentine Republic 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 719 

The Brazilian constitution of 1824 left education to the several 
States (twenty and one Federal District), and a permissive law 
of 1827 allowed the different States to establish schools. It was 
not until 1854, however, that public schools were organized in 
the Federal District, and these mark the real beginning of state 
education in Brazil. Since then the establishment of state schools 
has gradually extended to the coast States, and inland with the 
building of railway lines and the opening-up of the interior to 
outside influences. The basis for state-controlled education has 
now been laid in all the States, but the attendance at the schools 
as yet is small. ^ 

In some of the other South American States, such as Bolivia, 
Ecuador, and Venezuela, but little progress in extending state- 
controlled schools has as yet been made, and the training of the 
young is still left largely to private effort, the Church, and the 
rehgious orders. The illiteracy in all the South American States 
is still high, in part due to the large native populations, and 
much remains to be done before education becomes general there. 
The state-control idea, though, has been definitely established in 
principle in these countries. With the establishment of stable 
governments, the building of railroads and steamship lines, and 
the development of an important international commerce — 
events which there have characterized the first two decades of 
the twentieth century — early and important progress in state 
educational organization and in the extension of educational 
advantages may be expected. 

The state-school idea in eastern Asia. In 1854 Admiral Perry 
effected the treaty of friendship with Japan which virtually opened 
that nation to the influences of western civilization, and one of the 
most wonderful transformations of a people recorded in history 
soon began. In 1867 a new Mikado came to the throne, and in 
1868 the small military class, which had ruled the nation for some 
seven hundred years, gave up their power to the new ruler. A 
new era in Japan, known as the Meiji, dates from this event. 
In 187 1 the centuries-old feudal system was abolished, and all 
classes in the State were declared equal before the law. This 
same year the first newspaper in Japan was begun. In 1872 the 
first educational code for the nation was promulgated by the 
Mikado. This ordered the general estabUshment of schools, 
the compulsory education of the people (R. 334 a), and the 

1 In 1910 only about 3 per cent of the total population was in any type of school. 



720 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



equality of all classes in educational matters. Students were 
now sent abroad, especially to Germany and the United States; 
foreign teachers were imported; an American normal- school 
teacher was placed in charge of the newly opened state normal 
school; the American class method of instruction was introduced; 

schoolbooks and teaching appar- 
atus were prepared, after Ameri- 
can models; middle schools were 
organized in the towns; higher 
schools were opened in the cities; 
and the old Academy of Foreign 
Languages was evolved (1877) into 
the University of Tokyo. In 1884 
the study of English was intro- 
duced into the courses of the public 
schools. In 1889 a form of consti- 
tution was granted to the people, 
and a parliament established.^ 

Adapting the continental Euro- 
pean idea of a two-class school 
system to the peculiar needs of 
the nation, the Japanese have 
worked out, during the past half- 
century, a type of state-controlled 
school system which has been well 
adapted to their national needs. ^ 
Instruction in national morahty, 
based on the ancestral virtues, 
brotherly affection, and loyalty to 
the constitution and the ruling 
class (R. 334 b-c), has been well worked out in their schools. 
Though the government has remained largely autocratic in 
form, the Japanese have, however, retained throughout all their 
educational development the fundamental democratic principle 
enunciated in the Preamble to the Educational Code of 1872 

1 The Mikado still retained, through his ministers, very large powers, while the 
parliament was a consultative assembly rather than a legislative one. The form of 
government has been much like that of the German Empire before the World War. 

* The Japanese Government has so far been a military autocracy, and the Japan- 
ese have been the Prussians of the Orient. The two-class school system has accord- 
ingly met the needs of a benevolent autocracy fairly well. With the rise of a liberal 
party in Japan, and the beginning of some democratic life, we may look for pro- 
gressive changes in their schools which will tend to produce a more democratic 1)^)6 
pf educational organization. 




Fig. 213. The Japanese Two- 
Class School System 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 721 



(R. 334 a), viz., that every one without distinction of class or 
sex shall receive primary education at least, and that the oppor- 
tunity for higher education shall be open to all children. So com- 
pletely has the education of the people been conceived of as one 
of the most important functions of the State that all education 
has been placed under a central- 
ized state control, with a Cabinet 
Minister in charge of all admin- 
istrative matters connected with 
the education of the nation. 

Since near the end of the nine- 
teenth century what promises to 
be an even more wonderful trans- 
formation of a people — political, 
social, scientific, and industrial 
— has been taking place in China 
(R. 335). A much more demo- 
cratic type of national school sys- 
tem than that of the Japanese has 
been worked out, and this the 
new (191 2) Republic of China is 
rapidly extending in the prov- 
inces, and making education a 
very important function of the 
new democratic national life . ^ In 
the beginning, when displacing 
the centuries-old Confucian ed- 
ucational system,- the Chinese 
adopted Japanese ideas and organized their schools (1905) some- 
what after the Japanese model. Later on, responding to the 
influence of many American-educated Chinese and to the more 

1 "The idea of education for all classes, the aim of all educators and statesmen of 
western countries, scarcely entered the minds of the leaders of China under the 
traditional system of education. With the introduction of the new educational sys- 
tem, however, the problem of universal education suddenly came into prominence. 
Indeed, it is the stated goal of the new educational poHcy." (Ping Wen Kuo, The 
Chinese System of Public Education, p. 149.) 

2 Education in China has been common, for a class, for over four thousand years. 
The schools were private, but a detailed national system of examinations was pro- 
vided by the State, and all who expected any state preferment were required to pass 
these state examinations. The system was based on the old Confucian classics. 
Under it schools existed in all the chief towns, and the examination system exerted 
a strong unifying influence on the nation. In 1842 China opened five treaty ports 
to the ships and commerce of western nations, and from 1842 to 1903 a process of 
gradual transition from the ancient examination system to modem conditions took 
place. 




Fig. 214. The Chinese 
Educational Ladder 



122 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

democratic impulses of the Chinese people, the new gov^ernment 
established by the Republic of 191 2 changed the school system at 
first established so as to make it in type more like the American 
educational ladder. The new Chinese school system is shown in 
the drawing on page 721. The university instruction is modem 
and excellent, and the addition of the cultural and scientific knowl- 
edge worked out in western Europe to the intellectual qualities 
of this capable people can hardly fail to result, in time, in the 
production of a wonderful modern nation,^ probably in one of the 
greatest nations of the mid-twentieth century. 

In 1891 the independent Kingdom of Siam,^ awakened from its 
age-long isolation by new world influences, sent a prince to Europe 
to study and report on the state systems of education maintained 
there. As a result of his report a department of public education 
was created, which later evolved into a ministry of public instruc- 
tion, and elementary schools were opened by the State in the 
thirteen thousand old Buddhist temples. These schools offered a 
two-year course in Siamese, followed by a five-year course in 
English, given by imported English teachers. Schools for girls 
were provided, as well as for boys. Since this beginning, higher 
schools of law, medicine, agriculture, engineering, and mihtary 
science have been added, taught largely by imported English and 
American teachers. In consequence of the new educational or- 
ganization, and the new influences brought in, the whole life of 
this little kingdom has been transformed during the past three 
decades. 

General acceptance of the state-function conception. The 
different national school systems, the creation of which has so far 
been briefly described, are typical and represent a great world 
movement which characterized the latter half of the nineteenth 

1 "A nation that has preserved its identity by peaceful means for three milleni- 
ums; that has made the soil produce subsistence for a multitudinous population 
during that long period, while Western peoples have worn out their soil in less than 
that many centuries; that has produced many of the most influential of modern 
inventions, such as printing, gunpowder, and the compass; that has developed such 
mechanical ingenuity and commercial ability as are shown in its everyday life, un- 
doubtedly possesses the ability to accomplish results by the use of methods worked 
out by the Western world. When modem scientific knowledge is added by the 
Chinese to the skill which they already have in agriculture, in commerce, in industry, 
in government, and in mihtary affairs, results will be achieved, on the basis of their 
physical stamina and moral qualities, which will remove the ignorance, the indiffer- 
ence, and the prejudice of the Western world regarding things Chinese." (Monroe, 
Paul, Editorial introduction to Ping Wen Kuo's The Chinese System of Public 
Education.) 

^ Though appearing small on the map, Siam is a nation of six millions of people 
and an ^jea over tjjjree and a half times that of the six New England States. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 723 

century. This movement is still under way, and increasing in 
strength. Other state school organizations might be added to the 
list, but those so far given are sufficient. Beginning with the na- 
tions which were earliest to the front of the onward march of civi- 
lization, the movement for the state control of education, itself an 
expression of new world forces and new national needs, has in a 
century spread to every continent on the globe. To-day pro- 
gressive nations everywhere conceive of education for their peo- 
ple as so closely associated with their social, political, and indus- 
trial progress, and their national welfare and prosperity (R. 336), 
that the control of education has come to be regarded as an indis- 
pensable function of the State. State constitutions (R. 333) have 
accordingly required the creation of comprehensive state school 
systems; legislators have turned to education with a new interest; 
bulky state school codes have given force to constitutional man- 
dates; national literacy has become a goal; the diffusion of politi- 
cal intelligence by means of the school has naturally followed the 
extension of the suffrage ; while the many new forces and impulses 
of a modern world have served to make the old religious type of 
education utterly inadequate, and to call for national action to a 
degree never conceived of in the days when rehgious, private, and 
voluntary educational effort sufficed to meet the needs of the few 
who felt the call to learn. What a few of the more important of 
these new nineteenth-century forces have been, which have so 
fundamentally modified the character and direction of education, 
it may be worth while to set forth briefly, before proceeding fur- 
ther. 

II. NEW MODIFYING FORCES 

The advance of scientific knowledge. The first and most im- 
portant of these nineteenth-century forces, and the one which 
preceded and conditioned all the others, was the great increase of 
accurate knowledge as to the forces and laws of the physical world, 
arising from the application of scientific method to the investiga- 
tion of the phenomena of the material world (R. 337). During 
the nineteenth century the intellect of man was stimulated to ac- 
tivity as it had not been before since the days when little Athens 
was the intellectual center of the world. What the Revival of 
Learning was to the classical scholars of the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries, the movement for scientific knowledge and its 
application to human affairs was to the nineteenth. It changed 



724 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



the outlook of man on the problems of life, vastly enlarged the 
intellectual horizon, and gave a new trend to education and to 
scholarly effort. What the scholars of the seventeenth and eight- 
eenth centuries had been slowly gathering together as interesting 
and classified phenomena, the scientific scholars of the nineteenth 
century organized, interpreted, expanded, and applied. Since 
the day of Copernicus (p. 386) and Newton (p. 388) a growing ap- 
preciation of the permanence and scope of natural law in the uni- 
verse had been slowly developing, and this the scholars of the 
nineteenth century fixed as a principle and applied in many new 
directions. A few of the more important of these new directions 
may profitably be indicated here. 

In the domain of the physical sciences very important advances 
characterized the century. Chemistry, up to the end of the first 
quarter of the nineteenth century largely 
a collection of unrelated facts, was trans- 
formed by the labors of such men as Dal- 
ton (1766-1844), Faraday (1791-1867), and 
Liebig into a wonderfully well-organized 
and vastly important science. Liebig car- 
ried chemistry over into the study of the 
processes of digestion and the functioning 
of the internal organs, and reshaped much 
of the instruction in medicine. Liebig is 
also important as having opened, at Giessen, 
in 1826, the first laboratory instruction in 
chemistry for students provided in any 
university in the world. By many subse- 
quent workers chemistry has been so ap- 
plied to the arts that it is not too much to 
say that a knowledge of chemistry underlies the whole manu- 
facturing and industrial Hfe of the present, and that the degree 
of industrial preeminence held by a nation to-day is largely de- 
termined by its mastery of chemical processes. 

Physics has experienced an equally important development. 
It, too, at the beginning of the nineteenth century was in the pre- 
liminary state of collecting, coordinating, and trying to interpret 
data. In a century physics has, by experimentation and the ap- 
plication of mathematics to its problems, been organized into a 
number of exceedingly important sciences. In dynamics, heat, 
light, and particularly in electricity, discoveries and extension of 




Fig. 215. Baron 

Justus von Liebig 

(1803-73) 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 725 

previous knowledge of the most far-reaching significance have 
been made. What at the beginning of the nineteenth century 
was a small textbook study of natural philosophy has since been 
subdivided into the two great sciences of physics and chemistry, 
and these in turn into numerous well-organized branches. To- 
day these are taught, not from textbooks, but in large and costly 
laboratories, while manufacturing establishments and govern^ 
ments now find it both necessary and profitable to maintain large 
scientific institutions for chemical and physical research. 

The great triumph of physics, from the point of view of the 
reign of law in the world of matter, was the experimental estab- 
lishment (1849) of the fundamental principle of the conservation 
of energy. This ranks in importance in the world of the physical 
sciences with the theory of evolution in the biological. The per- 
fection of the spectroscope (1859) revealed the rule of chemical 
law among the stars, and clinched the theory of evolution as ap- 
plied to the celestial universe. The atomic theory of matter ^ 
was an extension of natural laws in another direction. In 1846 
occurred the most spectacular proof of the reign of natural law 
which the nineteenth century witnessed. Two scientists, in dif- 
ferent lands, ^ working independently, calculated the orbit of a 
new planet, Neptune, and when the telescope was turned to the 
point in the heavens indicated by their calculations the planet 
was there. It was a tremendous triumph for both mathematics 
and astronomy. Such work as this meant the firm establishment 
of scientific accuracy, and the ultimate elimination of the old the- 
ories of witchcraft, diabolic action, and superstition as controlling 
forces in the world of human affairs. 

The publication by Charles Lyell (i 797-1875) of his Principles 
of Geology, in 1830, marked another important advance in the 
knowledge of the operations of natural law in the physical world, 
and likewise a revolution in thinking in regard to the age and past 
history of the earth. Few books have ever more deeply influenced 
human thinking. The old theological conception of earthly 

^ "Through metaphysics first; then through alchemy and chemistry, through 
physical and astronomical spectroscopy, lastly through radio-activity, science has 
slowly groped its way to the atom." (Soddy, F., Matter and Energy.) 

^ Adams in England, and Leverrier in France. The planet Uranus had for long 
been known to be erratic in its movements, and Adams and Leverrier concluded, 
working from Newton's law for gravitation, that it must be due to the pull of an 
unknown planet. Both calculated the orbit of this unknown body, Adams sending 
his calculations to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and Leverrier to the 
observatory at Berlin. At both observatories the new planet — later named Nep- 
tune — was picked up by the telescope at the position indicated. 



726 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




Fig. 2i6. 

Charles Darwin 

(1809-82) 



"catastrophes " ^ was overthrown, and in its place was substituted 
the idea of a very long and a very orderly evolution of the planet. 
Geology was created as a new science, and out of this has come, by 
subsequent evolution, a number of other 
new sciences ^ which have contributed 
much to human progress. 

Another of the great books of all time 
appeared in 1859, when Charles Darwin 
(1809-188 2) published the results of thirty 
years of careful biological research in his 
Origin of Species. This swept away the 
old theory of special and individual crea- 
tion which had been cherished since early 
antiquity, and substituted in its place the 
reign of law in the field of biological life. 
This substitution of the principle of or- 
derly evolution for the old theory of special 
creation marked another forward step in 
human thinking,^ and gave an entirely new direction to the old 
study of natural history.^ In the hands of such workers as Wal- 
lace (1823-1913), Asa Gray (1810-88), Huxley (1825-94), and 
Spencer (1820-1903) it now proved a fruitful field. 

In 1856 the German Virchow (1821-1902) made his far-reach- 
ing contribution of cellular pathology to medical science; between 
1859 and 1865 the French scientist Pasteur (1822-95) established 
the germ theory of fermentation, putrefaction, and disease; about 
the same time the EngHsh surgeon Lister (1827-1914) began to 
use antiseptics in surgery; and, in 1879, the bacillus of typhoid 

1 This theory of "catastrophes" held that at a number of successive epochs, of 
which the age of Noah was the latest, great revolutions or disasters had taken place 
on the earth's surface, in which all living things were destroyed. Later the world 
was restocked, and again destroyed. This explained the successive strata, and the 
fossils they contained. For this theory Lyell substituted a slow and orderly evolu- 
tion, covering ages, and completely upset the Mosaic chronology. 

^ For example: — mineralogy, petrography, petrology, crystallography, stratig- 
raphy, and paleontology. 

^ "Darwin's Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plow into 
an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and 
repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books, light and 
heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides." (White, A. D., The War- 
fare of Science and Theology, vol. i, p. 70.) 

■* Natural history as a study goes back to the days of Aristotle, in Greece, but it 
had always been a study of fixed forms. Darwin destroyed this conception, and 
vitalized the new subject of biology. From this botany and zoology have been 
derived, and from these again many other new sciences, such as physiology, mor- 
phology, bacteriology, anthropology, cytology, entomology, and all the different 
agricultural sciences. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 727 




Fig. 



217. Louis Pasteur 

(1822-95) 



fever was found. Out of this work the modem sciences of pa- 
thology, aseptic surgery, bacteriology, and immunity were created, 
and the cause and mode of transmission of the great diseases ^ 
which once decimated armies and cities — 
plague, cholera, malaria, typhoid, typhus, 
yellow fever, dysentery — ■ as well as the 
scourges of tuberculosis, diphtheria, and 
lockjaw, have been determined. The im- 
portance of these discoveries for the fu- 
ture welfare and happiness of mankind 
can scarcely be overestimated. Sanitary 
science arose as an application of these 
discoveries, and since about 1875 a san- 
itary and hygienic revolution has taken 
place. 

The above represent but a few of the 
more important of the many great scien- 
tific advances of the nineteenth century. 
What the thinkers of the eighteenth century had sowed broadcast 
through a general interest in science, their successors in the nine- 
teenth reaped as an abundant harvest. The three great master 
keys of science — - the higher mathematics, the principle of the 
conservation of energy, and the principle of orderly evolution of 
life according to law — so long unknown to man, had at last been 
discovered, and, with these in their possession, men have since 
opened up many of the long-hidden secrets of cause and growth 
and form and function, both in the heavens and on the earth, and 
have revealed to a wondering world the prodigious and eternal 
forces of an orderly universe. The fruitfulness of the Baconian 
method (p. 390) in the hands of his successors has far surpassed 
his most sanguine expectations. 

The applications of science and the result. All this work, as 
has been frequently pointed out (R. 338), had of necessity to pre- 
cede the applications of science to the arts and to the advance- 
ment of the comforts and happiness of mankind. The new stud- 
ies soon caught the attention of younger scholars; special schools 
for their study began to be estabhshed by the middle of the nine- 
teenth century; ^ enthusiastic students of science began forcefully 
to challenge the centuries-long supremacy of classical studies; 

^ The bacillus of tuberculosis was isolated in 1882, Asiatic cholera in 1883, lock- 
jaw and diphtheria in 1884, and bubonic plague in 1894. 

' Schools of engineering, mining, agriculture, and applied science are types. 



728 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

funds for scientific research began to be provided; the printing- 
press disseminated the new ideas; and thousands of applications 
of science to trade and industry and human welfare began to at- 
tract public attention and create a new demand for schools and 
for a new extension of learning. During the past century the ap- 
plications of this new learning to matters that intimately touch 
the life of man have been so numerous and so far-reaching in their 
effects that they have produced a revolution in life conditions un- 
like anything the world ever experienced before. In all the 
days from the time of the Crusades to the end of the Napoleonic 
Wars the changes in living effected were less, both in scope and 
importance, than have taken place in the century since Napoleon 
was sent to Saint Helena. 

This transformation we call the Industrial Revolution. This, 
as we pointed out earlier (p. 492), began in England in the late 
eighteenth century. France did not experience its beginnings un- 
til after the Napoleonic Wars, though after about 1820 the trans- 
formations there were rapid and far-reaching. In the United 
States it began about 1810-15, and between 1820 and i860 the in- 
dustrial methods of the people of the northeastern quarter of the 
United States were revolutionized. Between i860 and 1900 they 
were revolutionized again. In the German States the trans- 
formation began about 1840, though it did not reach its great 
development until after the estabhshment of the Empire, in 
187 1. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, with the 
development of factories, the building of railroads, and the ex- 
tension of steamship lines, even the most remote countries have 
been affected by the new forces. Nations long primitive and 
secluded have been modernized and industrialized; century-old 
trades and skills have been destroyed by machinery; the old home 
and village industries have been replaced by the factory system; 
cities for manufacturing and trade have everywhere experienced a 
rapid development; and even on the farm the agricultural meth- 
ods of bygone days have been replaced by the discoveries of 
science and the products of invention. Almost nothing is done 
to-day as it was a century ago, and only in remote places do peo- 
ple live as they used to live. The nature and extent of the change 
which has been wrought, and some estimate as to its effect upon 
educational procedure, may perhaps be better comprehended if 
we first contrast living conditions before and after this industrial 
transformation. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 729 



Living conditions a century ago. A century ago people every- 
where lived comparatively simple Uves. The steam engine, 
while beginning to be put to use (p. 493), had not as yet been ex- 
tensively applied and made the wilHng and obedient slave of man. 
The lightning had not as yet been harnessed, and the now om- 
nipresent electric motor was 
then still unknowoi. Only in 
England had manufacturing 
reached any large proportions, 
and even there the methods 
were somewhat primitive. 
Thousands of processes which 
we now perform simply and 
effectively by the use of steam 
or electric power, a century 
ago were done slowly and pain- 
fully by human labor. The 
chief sources of power were 
then man and horse power. 
The home was a center in 




Fig. 218. Man Power before the 
Days of Steam 

Foot power a century ago. (From a cut 
by Anderson, America's first important 
engraver) 



which most of the arts and trades were practiced, and in the long 
winter evenings the old crafts and skills were turned to commer- 
cial account. What every family used and wore was largely 
made in the home, the village, or the neighborhood. 

Travel .was slow and expensive and something only the well-to- 
do could afford. To go fifty miles a day by stage-coach, or one 
hundred by sailing packet on the water, was extraordinarily 
rapid. "One could not travel faster by sea or by land," as Hux- 
ley remarked, "than at any previous time in the world's his- 
tory, and King George could send a message from London to 
York no faster than King John might have done." The steam 
train was not developed until about 1825, and through railway 
Unes not for a quarter-century longer. It took four days by 
coach from London to York (188 miles) ; six weeks by sailing ves- 
sel from Southampton to Boston; and six months from England to 
India. People moved about but Httle. A journey of fifty miles 
was an event — for many something not experienced in a life- 
time. To travel to a foreign land made a man a marked individ- 
ual. Benjamin Franklin tells us that he was frequently pointed 
out on the streets of Philadelphia, then the largest city in the 
United States, as a man who had been to Europe. George Tick- 



730 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



nor kas left us an interesting record (R. 339) of his difficulties, 
in finding anything in print in the libraries of the time, about 
1815, or any one who could tell him about the work of the German 
universities, which he, as a result of reading Madame de Stael's 
book on Germany, was desirous of attending.^ 

Everywhere it was a time of hard work and simple living. 
Every yoimgster had to become useful at an early age. The 
work of life, in town or on the farm, required hard and continual 
labor from all. Farm machinery had not been perfected, and 










Fig. 219. Threshing Wheat a Century ago 

(After a woodcut by Jacque, in L' Illustration) 

hand labor performed all the operations of ploughing and sow- 
ing, reaping and harvesting. With the introduction of the fac- 
tory system, men, women, and children were used to operate 
machinery, children being apprenticed to the mills at about eight 
years of age and working ten to twelve hours a day. This soon 
worked the hfe out of human beings^ and in consequence sick- 
ness, wretchedness, juvenile delinquency, ignorance, drunkenness, 
pauperism, and crime increased greatly as cities grew and the fac- 
tory system drew thousands from the farms to the towns. When 
Queen Victoria came to the throne (1837) one person in twelve in 
England was a pauper, and the lot of the poor was wretched in 
the extreme. In cities they lived in cellars and basements and 
hovels. There was practically no sanitation or drainage. Streets 

1 The book on Germany (De VAllemagne) by Madame de Stael (1766-1817), a 
brilliant French novelist, was pubHshed and immediately confiscated in France in 
181 1, and republished in England in 1813. It is one of the most remarkable books 
on one country written by a native of another which had appeared up to that time. 
Throueb reading it many English and Americans discovered a new world. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 731 




and alleys were filthy. Graveyards were commonly located in 
the heart of a town. A pure water-supply through water-mains 
was unknown. Pumps and water-carriers supplied nearly all the 
needs. There was in conse- 
quence much sickness, and 
Such diseases as typhoid 
and malaria ran rampant. 

Change in living condi- 
tions to-day. In a cen- 
tury all has been changed. 
Steam and electricity and 
sanitary science have trans- 
formed the world ; the rail- 
way, steamship, telegraph, 
cable, and printing-press 
have made the world one. 
The output of the factory 
system has transformed 
living and labor condi- 
tions, even to the remote 
corners of the world ; sani- 
tary science and sanitary 
legislation have changed the primitive conditions of the home 
and made of it a clean and comfortable modern abode; men 
and women have been freed from an almost incalculable amount 
of drudgery and toil, and the human effort and time saved may 
now be devoted to other types of work or to enjoyment and learn- 
ing. Thousands who once were needed for menial toil on farm or 
in shop and home are now freed for employment in satisfying 
new wants and new pleasures that mankind has come to know,^ 
or may devote their time and energies to forms of service that 
advance the welfare of mankind or minister to the needs of the 
human spirit. 

Labor-saving devices and the applications of scientific work 
have touched all phases of life and labor of men and women, and 

'^ For example, it has been estimated that one fifteenth of the working population 
of modern industrial nations devotes itself to transportation; another one fifteenth 
to maintaining public services — light, gas, telephone, water, sewage, streets, parks 
— unknown in earlier times; and another one fifteenth to the manufacture and 
distribution and care of automobiles. Add still further the numbers employed in con- 
nection with theaters, moving-picture shows, phonographs, magazines and the news- 
papers, soft-drink places, millinery and dry goods, hospitals, and similar "append- 
ages of civilization," and we get some idea of the increased labor eflSciency which 
the appHcations of science have brought about. 



220. A City Water-Supply 
ABOUT 1830 
(After a lithograph by Bellange) 



732 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

under modern methods of transportation go ever5nvhere. The 
American self-binding reaper is found in the grain-fields of Russia 
and the Argentine; one may buy cans of kerosene and tinned 
meats and vegetables almost anywhere in the world to-day; sew- 
ing machines and phonographs add to the comfort and pleasure 
of the African native and the dweller on the Yukon; "milady" in 
Siam uses cosmetics manufactured for the devotees of fashion in 
Paris; the Sultan of Sulu wears an elegant American wrist-watch; 
the Dahomeny tribesman has a safety razor, and a mirror of 
French plate; the Persian dandy wears shoes and haberdashery 
made in the United States; old Chinamen up the Yellow River 
Valley read their Confucius by the light of an Edison Mazda ; the 
steam train wends its way up from Jaffa to Jerusalem; the gaso- 
line power boat chugs its course up the Nile the Pharaohs sailed; 
and modern surgical methods and instruments are used in the 
hospitals of Manila and Singapore, Cairo and Cape Town. A 
rupee spent for thread at Calcutta starts the spindles going in 
Manchester; a new calico dress for a Mandalay belle helps the 
cotton-print mills of Leeds; a new carving set for a Fiji Islander 
means more labor for some cutlery works in Sheffield; a half-dollar 
for a new undershirt in Panama means increased work for a cotton 
mill in New England; a new blanket called for against the win- 
ter's cold of Siberia moves the looms of some Rhode Island town; 
a dime spent for a box of matches in Alaska means added labor 
and profit for a match factory in California; a new bath tub in 
Paraguay spells increased output for a factory at Milan or Turin; 
and the Christmas wishes of the children in Brazil give work to 
the toy factories of Nuremberg. 

Trains and huge steamers move to-day along the great trade 
routes of the modern world, exchanging both the people and their 
products. The holds of the ships are filled with coal and grain 
and manufactured implements and commodities of every de- 
scription, while their steerage space is crowded with modern 
Marco Polos and Magellans going forth to see the world. The 
Hindoo walks the streets of Cape Town, London, Sydney, New 
York, San Francisco, and Valparaiso; the Russian Jew is found in 
all the Old and New World cities ; the Englishman and the Ameri- 
can travel everywhere; the Japanese are fringing the Pacific with 
their laboring classes; toiling Italians and Greeks are found all 
over the wbrld; peasants from the Balkans gather the prune 
and orange crops of California; the moujic from the Russian Cau- 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 733 



HO 190 140 




Long. E. 60 Iroi.i Green. 100 



Fig. 221. The Great Trade Routes of the Modern World 

Broken lines, on land, indicate gaps soon to be closed. Compare this with the maps 
on pages i6i and 258, and note the progress in discovery and intercommunication. 
Ships and trains are constantly passing over these routes, bearing both freight and 
peoples. 



casus tills the wheat-fields of the Dakotas; while the Irish, 
Scandinavians, and Teutons form the political, farming, and 
commercial classes in many far-distant lands. In the recent 
World War Serbs from Montana and Colorado fought side by 
side with Serbs from Belgrade and Nisch; Greeks from New York 
and San Francisco helped their brothers from Athens drive the 
Bulgars back up the Vardar Valley; ItaHans from New Orleans 
and Rio de Janeiro helped their kinsmen from the valley of the Po 
hold back the Hun from the Venetian plain; Chinese from the 
valleys of the Tong-long and the Yang-tse-Kiang backed up the 
Allied armies by tilling the fields of France; and Algerian and 
Senegalese natives helped the French hold back the Teutonic 
hordes from the ravishment of Paris. So completely has the old 
isolation been broken down! So completely is the world in flux! 
So small has the world become! 

It was almost a century from the time instruction in Greek was 
revived in Florence (1396) until Linacre first lectured on Greek at 
Oxford (c. 1492); six months after the X-ray was perfected in 
Germany it was in use in the hospitals of San Francisco. In the 
Middle Ages thousands might have died of starvation in Persia or 
Egypt, a famous city in Asia Minor might have been destroyed by 
an earthquake and many people killed, or war might have raged 
for years in the Orient without a citizen of western Europe know- 



734 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



ing of it all his life. To-day any important event anywhere 
within the range of the telegraph or the cable would be reported 
in to-morrow morning's paper, and carefully described and illus- 
trated in the magazines at an early date. Man is no longer a 
citizen of a town or a state, but of a nation and of the world. 
How intelligently he can use this larger citizenship depends to- 
day largely upon the character and the extent of the education he 
has received. 

Effect of these changes on the laboring-classes. At first the 
effect of the introduction of factory-made goods and labor-saving 
devices was to upset the old estabhshed institutions. Trades 
practiced by the guilds since the Middle Ages were destroyed, be- 
cause factories could turn out goods faster and cheaper than guild 
workmen could make them. The age-old apprenticeship system 
began to break down. Everywhere people were thrown out of 

employment, and a vast shift- 
ing of occupations took place. 
There was much discontent, 
and laborers began to unite, 
where allowed to do so,^ with 
a view to improving their eco- 
nomic and political condition 
by concerted action. The 
political revolutions of 1848 
throughout Europe were in 
part a manifestation of this 
discontent, and the right to 
organize was everywhere de- 
manded and in time generally 
obtained. Among the planks 
in their platform were equal- 
ity of all before the law; the 
limitation of child and woman labor; better working conditions 
and wages; the provision of schools for their children at public 
expense; and the extension of the right of suffrage. 

^ Labor unions were legalized in England in 1825. In the United States they 
arose about 1825-30, and for a time played an important part in securing legislation 
to better the condition of the workingman and to secure education for his children. 
In continental Europe, the reactionary governments following the downfall of 
Napoleon forbade assemblies of workingmen or their organization, as dangerous to 
government. In consequence, labor organizations in France were not permitted 
until 1848, and in Germany and Austria not until after the middle of the century. 
In Japan, as late as 1919, laborers were denied the right to organize. 




Fig. 222. An Example of the Smrx- 
iNG OF Occupations 

Sawing boards by hand, before the intro- 
duction of steam power. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 735 

Despite certain unfortunate results following the change from 
age-old working conditions, the century of transition has seen the 
laboring man making gains unknown before in history, and the 
peasant has seen the abolition of serfdom ^ and feudal dues. 
Homes have gained tremendously. The drudgery and wasteful 
toil have been greatly mitigated. To-day there is a standard of 
comfort and sanitation, even for those in the humblest circum- 
stances, beyond all previous conceptions. The poorest workman 
to-day can enjoy in his home lighting undreamed of in the days of 
tallow candles; warmth beyond the power of the old smoky soft- 
coal grate; food of a variety and quality his ancestors never knew; 
kitchen conveniences and an ease in kitchen work wholly un- 
known until recently; and sanitary conveniences and conditions 
beyond the reach of the wealthiest half a century ago. The caste 
system in industry has been broken down, and men and their 
children may now choose their occupations freely,^ and move 
about at will. Wages have greatly increased, both actually and 
relatively to the greatly improved standard of living. The work 
of women and children is easier, and all work for shorter hours. 
Child labor is fast being eliminated in all progressive nations. In 
consequence of all these changes for the better, people to-day have 
a leisure for reading and thinking and personal enjoyment en- 
tirely unknown before the middle of the nineteenth century, and 
governments everywhere have found it both desirable and neces- 
sary to provide means for the utilization of this leisure and the 
gratification of the new desires. Along with these changes has 
gone the development of the greatest single agent for spreading 
liberalizing ideas — the modern newspaper — " the most inveter- 
ate enemy of absolutism and reaction." Despite censorships, 
suppressions, and confiscations, the press has by now established 
its freedom in all enlightened lands, and the cylinder press, the 
telegraph, and the cable have become "indispensable adjuncts to 

^ Up to 1789 serfdom was the rule on the continent of Europe; by 1850 there was 
practically no serfdom in central and western Europe, and in 1866 serfdom was 
abolished in Russia. For the worker and farmer the years between 1789 and 1848 
were years of rapid progress in the evolution from mediaeval to modern conditions 
of liv'ing. 

^ Under conditions existing up to the close of the eighteenth century, in part per- 
sisting up to the middle of the nineteenth on the continent, and still found in unpro- 
gressive lands, a close Hmitation of the rights of labor was maintained. Children 
followed the trade of their fathers, and the right of an apprentice later to open a 
shop and better his condition was prohibited until after he had become an accepted 
master (p. 210) in his craft. Guild members, too, were not permitted to branch out 
into any other line of activity, or to introduce any new methods of work. All these 
old limitations the Industrial Revolution swept away. 



736 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the development of that power which every absolutist has come to 
dread, and with which every prime minister must daily reckon." 

III. EFFECT OF THESE CHANGES ON EDUCATION 

General result of these changes. The general result of the 
vast and far-reaching changes which we have just described is 
that the intellectual and political horizon of the working classes 
has been tremendously broadened ; the home has been completely 
altered; children now have much leisure and do little labor; and 
the common man at last is rapidly coming into his own. Still 
more, the common man seems destined to be the dominant force 
in government in the future. To this end he and his children 
must be educated, his wife and children cared for, his home pro- 
tected, and governments must do for him the things which satisfy 
his needs and advance his welfare. The days of the rule of a 
small intellectual class and of government in the interests of such 
a class have largely passed, and the political equality which the 
Athenian Greeks first in the western world gave to the ''citizens" 
of little Athens, the Industrial Revolution h ^s fo^'^^H ^^'^d'^^'-^^rnnd 
enlighten eH governments tn_ gnvgJ^^^1HjhevrjTeople. In conse- 
quence, real democracy in government, education, justice, and 
social welfare is now in process of being attained generally, for the 
first time in the history of the world. 

The effect of all these changes in the mode of living of peoples 
is written large on the national life. The political and industrial 
revolutions which have marked the ushering-in of the modern age 
have been far-reaching in their consequences. The old home life 
and home industries of an earlier period are passing, or have 
passed, never to return. Peoples in all advanced nations are rap- 
idly swinging into the stream of a new and vastly more complex 
world civilization, which brings them into contact and competi- 
tion with the best brains of all mankind. At the same time a 
great and ever-increasing specialization of human effort is taking 
place on all sides, and with new and ever more difficult social, po- 
litical, educational, industrial, commercial, and human-life prob- 
lems constantly presenting themselves for solution. The world 
has become both larger and smaller than it used to be, and even 
its remote parts are now being linked up, to a degree that a cen- 
tury ago would not have been deemed possible, with the future 
welfare of the nations which so long bore the brunt of the struggle 
for the preservation and advancement of civilization. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 737 

These changes and the school. It is these vast and far-reach- 
ing political, industrial, and social changes which have been the 
great actuating forces behind the evolution and expansion of the 
state school systems which we have so far described. The Ameri- 
can and French poHtical revolutions, with their new philosophy, 
of political equality and state control of education, clearly inaugu- 
rated the movement for taking over the school from the Church 
and the making of it an important instrument of the State. The 
extension of the suffrage to new classes gave a clear political mo- 
tive for the school, and to train young people to read and write 
and know the constitutional bases of liberty became a poUtical 
necessity. The industrial revolution which followed, bringing in 
its train such extensive changes in labor and in the conditions 
surrounding home and child life, has since completely altered the 
face of the earlier educational problem. What was simple once 
has since become complex, and the complexity has increased with 
time. Once the ability to read and write and cipher distinguished 
the educated man from the uneducated; to-day the man or woman 
who knows only these simple arts is an uneducated person, hardly- 
fit to cope with the struggle for existence in a modern world, and 
certainly not fitted to participate in the complex political and in- 
dustrial life of which, in all advanced nations, he or she ^ to-day 
forms a part. 

It is the attempt to remould the school and to make of it a 
more potent instrument of the State for promoting national con- 
sciousness (R. 340) and political, social, and industrial welfare 
that has been behind the many changes and expansions and ex- 
tensions of education which have marked the past half-century 
in all the leading world nations, and which underlie the most 
pressing problems in educational readjustment to-day. These 
changes and expansions and problems we shall consider more in 
detail in the chapters which follow. Suffice it here to say that 
from mere teaching institutions, engaged in imparting a little re- 
ligious instruction and some knowledge of the tools of learning, 
the school, in all the leading nations, has to-day been transformed 
into an institution for advancing national welfare. The leading 
purpose now is to train for political and social efiiciency in the 

1 Women in Europe have secured the ballot rapidly since the end of the nine- 
teenth century. With manhood suffrage secured, universal suffrage is the next 
step. Women were given the right to vote and hold office in Finland in 1906; in 
Norway in 1907; in Denmark in 1916; in England in 1918; in Germany in 1919; and 
in the United States in 1920. 



738 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

more democratic types of governments being instituted among 
peoples, and to impart to the young those industrial and social 
experiences once taught in the home, the trades, and on the farm, 
but which the coming of the factory system and city life have 
deprived them otherwise of knowing. 

New problems to be met by education. As participation in the 
political life of nations has been extended to larger and larger 
groups of the people, and as the problems of government have be- 
come more and more complex, the schools have found it necessary 
to add instruction in geography, history, government, and na- 
tional ideals and culture to the earlier instruction. In the less 
democratic nations which have evolved national school systems, 
this new instruction has often been utilized to give strength to the 
type of government and social conditions which the ruling class 
desired to have perpetuated. This has been the evident purpose 
in Japan (R. 334) , though the government of Imperial Germany 
formed perhaps the best illustration of such perversion. This 
was seen and pointed out long ago by Horace Mann (R. 281). 
There the idea of nationality through education (R. 342) was car- 
ried to such an extreme as made the government oppressive to 
subject peoples and a menace to neighboring States.^ On the 
other hand, the French have used their schools for national ends 
(R. 341) in a manner that has been highly commendable. 

As the social life of nations has become broader and more com- 
plex, a longer period of guidance has become necessary to prepare 
the future citizens of the State for intelligent participation in it. 
As a result, child life everywhere has and is still experiencing a 
new lengthening of the period of dependence and training, and all 
national interests now indicate that the period devoted to prepar- 
ing for life's work will need to be further lengthened. All recent 
thinking and legislation, as well as the interests of organized labor 
and the pubhc welfare, have in recent decades set strongly against 
child labor. Economically unprofitable under modern industrial 
conditions, and morally indefensible, it has at last come to be ac- 
cepted as a principle, by progressive nations, that it is better for 
children and for society that they remain under some form of in- 
struction until they are at least sixteen years of age. To this end 
the common primary school has been continued upward, part- 
time continuation schools of various types have been organized 

1 See an excellent brief article "On German Education," by E. C. Moore, in 
School aiid Society, vol. i, pp. 886-89. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 759 

for those who must go to labor earlier, and people's high schools or 
middle schools have been added (see Figure 210, p. 713) to give 
the equivalent of a high-school education to the children of the 
classes not patronizing the exclusive and limited tuition second- 
ary school. 

As large numbers of immigrants from distant lands have en- 
tered some of the leading nations, notably England and the 
United States, and particularly immigrants from less advanced 
nations where general education is not as yet common, and where 
Jar different political, social, judicial, and hygienic conditions pre- 
vail, a new duty has been thrust upon the school of giving to such 
incoming peoples, and their children, some conception of the 
meaning and method and purpose of the national life of the people 
they have come among. The national schools have accordingly 
been compelled to give attention to the needs of these new ele- 
ments in the population, and to direct their attention less exclu- 
sively to satisfying the needs of the well-to-do classes of society. 
Educational systems have in consequence tended more and more 
to become democratic in character, and to serve in part as instru- 
ments for the assimilation of the stranger within the nation's 
gates and for the perpetuation and improvement of the national 
Hfe. 

Education a constructive national tool. One result of the many 
political, social, and industrial changes of a century has been to 
evolve education into the great constructive tool of modem po- 
litical society. For ages a church and private affair, and of no 
great importance for more than a few, it has to-day become the 
prime essential to good government and national progress, and is 
so recognized by the leading nations of the world. As people are 
freed from autocratic rule and take upon themselves the functions 
of government, and as they break loose from their age-old politi- 
cal, social, and industrial moorings and swing out into the current 
of the stream of modern world-civilization, the need for the educa- 
tion of the masses to enable them to steer safely their ship of 
state, and take their places among the stable governments of a 
modern world, becomes painfully evident. In the hands of an un- 
educated people a democratic form of government is a dangerous 
instrument, while the proper development of natural resources 
and the utilization of trade opportunities by backward peoples, 
without being exploited, is almost impossible. In Russia, Mex- 
ico, and the Central American ''republics" we see the results of a 



740 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



democracy in the hands of an uneducated people. There, too 
often, the revolver instead of the ballot box is used to settle pub- 
lic issues, and instead of orderly government under law we find 
injustice and anarchy, A general system of education that will 
teach the fundamental principles of constitutional liberty, and 
apply science to production in agricul- 
ture and manufacturing, is almost the 
only solution for such conditions. By 
contrast with the surrounding "repub- 
lics" one finds in Guatemala^ a coun- 
try that has used education intelligently 
as a tool to advance the interests of its 
people. 

When the United States freed Cuba, 
Porto Rico, and the Philippines from 
Spanish rule, a general system of public 
education, modeled after the American 
educational ladder, was created as a safe- 
guard to the liberty Just brought to these 
islands, and to education the United 
States added courts of justice and bu- 
reaus of sanitation as important auxili- 
ary agencies. As a result the peoples of 
these islands have made a degree of pro- 
gress in self-government and industry in 
three decades not made in three centu- 



^ A State approximately the size of Illinois, and 
containing a population of about two million people. 
The great development of this country is in reality a 
history of the work of President Manuel Estrada 
Cabrera, who was president from 1898 to 1920. His 
ruling interest has been public education, believing 
that in universal education rests the future greatness 
of the State. He accordingly labored to establish 
schools, and to bring them up to as high a level 
as possible. The government has spent much in 
building modern-type schoolhouses and in subsidiz- 
ing schools, holding that with the proper training of 
the younger generation the future position of the na- 
tion rests. A sincere admirer of the United States, 
American models have been copied. When the United 
States entered the World War, Guatemala was the 
first Central American republic to follow. During 
the War President Cabrera "would allow nothing 
to interfere with the advancement of free and com- 
pulsory education in the State." (See Domville- 
Fife, C. W., Guatemala and the States of Central 
America.) 




Fig. 223. 
The PmLippiNE School 

System 

A teacher-training course is 
given as one of the voca- 
tional courses in the Inter- 
mediate School, and the 
Normal School at Manila re- 
presents one of the secondary 
school courses. The Univer- 
sity, besides the combined 
five-year college course, has 
eight professional courses of 
from three to five years in 
\ength. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 741 

ries under Spanish rule. The good results of the work done in 
these islands in establishing schools, building roads and bridges, 
introducing police courts, establishing good sanitary conditions, 
building hospitals and training nurses, applying science to agri- 
culture, developing tropical medicine, and training the people in 
the difficult art of self-government, will for long be a monument to 
the political foresight and intelligent conceptions of government 
held by the American people. In a similar way the French have 
opened schools in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Senegal, Madagascar, 
and French Indo- China, as have the English in Egypt, India, 
Hong Kong,^ the West Indies, and elsewhere. With the freeing 
of Palestine from the rule of the Turk, the English at once began 
the establishment of schools and a national university there, and 
doubtless they will do the same in time in Persia and Mesopo- 
tamia. 

Germany, too, before the World War, but with less benevolent 
purposes than the Americans, the French, or the English, was also 
busily engaged in extending her influence through education. 
Her universities were thrown open to students from the whole 
world, and excellent instruction did they offer. The ''Society 
for the Extension of Germanism in Foreign Countries" rendered 
an important service. Professors were "exchanged"; the intro- 
duction of instruction in the German language into the schools of 
other nations was promoted; and German schools were founded 
and encouraged abroad. Especially were Realschiden promoted 
to teach the wonders of German science, pure and applied. In 
southern Brazil and the Argentine, and in Roumania, Bulgaria, 
and Turkey, particular efforts were made to extend German in- 
fluence and pave the way for German commercial and perhaps 
political expansion. Primary schools, girls' schools, and Real- 
schools in numbers were founded and aided abroad, and their 
progress reported to the colonial minister at home. All through 
the Near East the German was busily building, through trade 

1 "Imagine how the streams of Celestials circulating between Hong Kong and 
the mainland spread the knowledge of what a civilized government does for the 
people ! At Shanghai and Tientsin, veritable fairylands for the Chinese, they cannot 
but contrast the throngs of rickshas, dog-carts, broughams, and motor cars that pour 
endlessly through the spotless asphalt streets with the narrow, crooked, filthy, noi- 
some streets of their native city, to be traversed only on foot or in a sedan chair. 
Even the young mandarin, buried aUve in some dingy walled town of the far interior, 
without news, events, or society, recalled with longing the lights, the gorgeous tea 
houses, and the alluring 'sing-song' girls of Foochow Road, and cursed the stupid 
policy of a government that penalized even enterprising Chinamen who tried to 
'start something' for the benefit of the community." (Ross, E. A., Changing 
America, p. 22.) 



742 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and education, a new empire for himself. Had he been content to 
follow the slower paths of peaceful commercial and intellectual 
conquest, with his wonderful organization he would have been 
irresistible. With one gambler's throw he dashed his future to the 
ground, and unmasked himself before the world! 

Expansion of the educational idea. In all lands to-day where 
there is an intelligent government, the education of the people 
through a system of state-controlled schools is regarded as of the 
first importance in moulding and shaping the destinies of the na- 
tion and promoting the country's welfare. Beginning with edu- 
cation to impart the ability to read and write and cipher, and as 
an aid to the political side of government, the education of the 
masses has been so expanded in scope during the century that to- 
day it includes aims, classes, types of schools, and forms of service 
scarcely dreamed of at the time the State began to take over the 
school from the Church, with a view to extending elementary edu- 
cational advantages and promoting literacy and citizenship. 
What some of the more important of these expansions have been 
we shall state in a following chapter, but before doing so let us re- 
turn to another phase of the problem — that of the progress of 
educational theory — and see what have been the main lines of 
this progress in the theory as to the educational purpose since the 
time when Pestalozzi formulated a theory for the secular school. 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. What does the emphasis on the People's High Schools in Denmark indi 
cate as to the poHtical status of the common people there? 

2. Explain the educational prominence of Finland, compared with its 
neighbor Russia. 

3. Show the close relation between the character of the school system devel- 
oped in Japan and the character of its government. In China. 

4. Show why the state-function conception of education is destined to be 
the ruling plan everywhere. 

5. Show the close connection between the Industrial Revolution and a 
somewhat general diffusion of the fundamental principles revealed by 
the study of science. 

6. Show how the Industrial Revolution has created entirely new problems 
in education, and what some of these are. 

7. Show the connection between the Industrial Revolution and political 
enfranchisement. 

8. Enumerate some of the educational problems we now face that we should 
not have had to deal with had the Industrial Revolution not taken place. 

9. Why has the result of these changes been to extend the period of depend- 
ence and tutelage of children? 

10. Outline an educational solution of the problem of Mexico. Of Russia. 
Of Persia. 



EDUCATION BECOMES A NATIONAL TOOL 743 

11. Show how Germany found it profitable to establish Realschulen in such 
distant countries as Turkey, Mesopotamia, and the Argentine. 

12. Describe the expansion of the educational idea since the days when 
Pestalozzi formulated the theory for the secular school. 

13. What is the social significance of the development of parallel secondary 
schools and courses, in all lands? 

14. Contrast the American and the European secondary school in purpose. 
Why should the American be a free school, while those in Europe are 
tuition schools? 

15. Show why the essentially democratic school system maintained in the 
United States would not be suited to an autocratic form of government. 

16. Show that the weight of a priesthood and the force of religious instruc- 
tion in the schools would be strong supports for monarchical forms of 
government. 

17. Homogeneous monarchical nations look after the training of their teach- 
ers much better than does such a cosmopolitan nation as the United 
States. Why? 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following illustrative selections 
are reproduced: 

333- Switzerland: Constitutional Provisions as to Education and Religiou?: 
Freedom. 

334. Japan: The Basic Documents of Japanese Education. 

(o) Preamble to the Education Code of 1872. 
{b) Imperial Rescript on Moral Education. 
(c) Instructions as to Lessons on Morals. 

335. Ping Wen Kuo: Transformation of China by Education. 

336. Mann: Education and National Prosperity. 

337. Huxley: The Recent Progress of Science. 

338. Anon. : Scientific Knowledge must precede Invention. 

339. Ticknor: Illustrating Early Lack of Communication. 

340. Monroe: The Struggle for National Realization. 

341. Buisson, F.: The French Teacher and the National Spirit. 

342. Fr. de Hovre: The German Emphasis on National Ends. 

343. Stuntz: Landing of the Pilgrims at Manila. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Compare the Swiss and American Federal organizations, and state jusl 
what the Swiss Constitution (333) provides as to education. 

2. Suppose you knew nothing about the Japanese, what type of govern- 
ment would you take theirs to be from reading the Imperial Rescript 
(334 b)? . 

3. In comparing the Chinese transformation and the Renaissance (335), 
does Mr. Ping propose comparable events? 

4. Show that Mr. Mann's argument (336) is still sound. 

5. Does Huxley overdraw (337) our dependence on science? 

6. From 338, show why the Middle Ages were so poor in inventions and 
discoveries. 

7. Are there universities anywhere to-day of which we know as little as 
Ticknor was able to find out (339) a century ago? 

8. Show that Monroe's statements are true that the struggle for national 
realization (340) has dominated modern history from the fifteenth cen- 
tury on. 



744 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

9. Compare the conceptions as to the function of education in a State as 
revealed in the selections as to French (341) and German (342) educa- 
tional purpose. 
10. Show the entirely new character of the event (343) described by Stuntz. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Buisson, F. and Farrington, F. E. French Educational Ideals of To-day. 
Butler, N. M. "Status of Education at the Close of the Century"; in 

Proceedings National Education Association, igoo, pp. 188-96. 
Davidson, Thos. "Education as World Building"; in Educational Re- 
view, vol. XX, pp. 325-45. (November, 1900.) 
Doolittle, Wm. H. Inventions of the Century. 

Foster, M. "A Century's Progress in Science"; in Educational Review, 
vol. xviii, pp. 313-31. (November, 1899.) 
*Friedel, V. H. The German School as a War Nursery. 
Gibbons, H. de B. Economic and Industrial Progress of the Century. 
Hughes, J. L., and Klemm, L. R. Progress of Education in the Nineteenth 
Century. 
*Huxley, Thos. "The Progress of Science"; in his Methods and Results. 
*Kuo, Ping Wen. The Chinese System of Public Education. 
Lewis, R. E. The Educational Conquest of the Far East. 
Macknight, Thos. Political Progress of the Century. 
*Ross, E. A. "The World Wide Advance of Democracy " ; in his Changing 
America. 
Routledge, R. A Popular History of Science. 
Sandiford, Peter, Editor. Comparative Education. 
*Sedgwick, W. T., and Tyler, H. W. A Short History of Science. 
*Thwing, C. F. Education in the Far East. 
Webster, W. C. General History of Commerce. 
White, A. D. The Warfare of Science and Theology. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
NEW CONCEPTIONS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS 

I. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION OF ELEMENTARY 
INSTRUCTION 

The beginnings of normal-school training. The training of 
would-be teachers for the work of instruction is an entirely mod- 
ern proceeding. The first class definitely organized for imparting 
training to teachers, concerning which we have any record, was 
a small local training group of teachers of reading and the Cate- 
chism, conducted by Father Demia, at Lyons, France, in 
1672. The first normal school to be established anywhere was 
that founded at Rheims, in northern France, in 1685, by Abbe de 
la Salle (p. 347). He had founded the Order of "The Brothers of 
the Christian Schools" the preceding year, to provide free reli- 
gious instruction for children of the working classes in France 
(R. 182), and he conceived the new idea of creating a special 
school to train his prospective teachers for the teaching work of 
his Order. Shortly afterward he established two similar institu- 
tions in Paris. Each institution he called a " Seminary for School- 
masters." In addition to imparting a general education of the 
type of the time, and a thorough grounding in religion, his student 
teachers were trained to teach in practice schools, under the 
direction of experienced teachers. This was an entirely new idea. 

The beginnings elsewhere, as we have previously pointed out 
were made in German lands, Francke's Seminarium Proeceptorum, 
established at Halle (p. 419), in 1697, coming next in point of 
time. In 1738 Johann Julius Hecker (1707-68), one of Francke's 
teachers (p. 562), established the first regular Seminary for 
Teachers in Prussia, and in 1748 he established a private Le//rer- 
seminar in Berlin. In these two institutions he first showed the 
German people the possibilities of special training for teachers 
in the secondary school. In 1753 the Berlin institution was 
adopted as a Royal Teachers' Seminary (p. 563) by Frederick the 
Great. After this, and in part due to the enthusiastic support 
of the Berlin institution by the King, the teacher-training idea 
for secondary teachers began to find favor among the Germans. 
We accordingly find something like a dozen Teachers' Seminaries 



746 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

had been founded in German lands before the close of the eight, 
eenth century.^ A normal school was established in Denmark, 
by royal decree, as early as 1789, and five additional schools 
when the law organizing public instruction in Denmark was 
enacted, in 18 14. In France the beginnings of state action came 
with the action of the National Convention, which decreed the 
establishment of the "Superior Normal School for France," in 
1794 (p. 517). This institution, though, was short lived, and the 
real beginnings of the French higher normal school awaited the 
reorganizing work of Napoleon, in 1808 (p. 595; R. 283). 

The schools just mentioned represent the first institutions in 
the history of the world organized for the purpose of training 
teachers to teach. The teachers they trained, though, were 
intended primarily for the secondary schools, and the training was 
largely academic in character. Only in Silesia was any effort 
made, before the nineteenth century, to give training in special 
institutions to teachers intended for the vernacular schools. 
There Frederick the Great, in his "Regulations for the Catholic 
Schools of Silesia" (R. 275, a § 2) designated six cathedral and 
monastery schools as model schools, where teachers could "have 
the opportunity for learning all that is needed by a good teacher." 
In another place he defined this as "skill in singing and playing 
the organ sufficient to perform the services of the Church," and 
"the art of instructing the young in the German language" 
(R. 275, a § i). So long as the instruction in the vernacular 
school consisted chiefly of reading and the Catechism, and of 
hearing pupils recite what they had memorized, there was of 
course but little need for any special training for the teachers. 
It was not until after Pestalozzi had done his work and made his 
contribution that there was anything worth mentioning to train 
teachers for. 

Pestalozzi^s contribution. The memorable work done by 
Pestalozzi in Switzerland, during his quarter-century (1800-25) 
of effort at Burgdorf and Yverdon, changed the whole face of the 
preparation of teachers problem. His work was so fundamental 
that it completely redirected the education of children. Taking 

^ The earliest Teachers' Seminaries in German lands were : 

1750. Alfeld, in Hanover. I777- Bamberg, in Bavaria. 

1753- Wolfenbiittel, in Brunswick. 1778. Halberstadt, in Prussia. 

1764. Glatz, in Prussia. i779- Coburg, in Gotha. 

1765. Breslau, in Prussia. 1780. Segeberg, in Holstein. 
1768. Carlsruhe, in Baden. 1785. Dresden, in Saxony. 

1 771. Vienna, in Austria. I794- Weissenfels, in Prussia. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 747 

the seed-thought of Rousseau that sense-impression was "the 
only true foundation of human knowledge" (R. 267), he enlarged 
this to the conception of the mental development of human 
beings as being organic, and proceeding according to law. His 
extension of this idea of Rousseau's led him to declare that educa- 
tion was an individual development, a drawing-out and not a 
pouring-in; that the basis of all education exists in the nature of 
man; and that the method of education is to be sought and con- 
structed.^ These were his great contributions. These ideas 
fitted in well with the rising tide of individualism which marked 
the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, and upon 
these contributions the modern secular elementary school has 
been built. 

These ideas led Pestalozzi to emphasize sense perception and 
expression; to formulate the rule that in teaching we must pro- 
ceed from the concrete to the abstract; and to construct a "fac- 
ulty psychology" which conceived of education as "a harmoni- 
ous development" of the different "faculties" of the mind. He 
also tried, unsuccessfully to be sure, to so organize the teaching 
process that eventually it could be so "mechanized" that there 
would be a regular A, B, C, for each type of instruction, which, 
once learned, would give perfection to a teacher. In his Report 
of 1800 (R. 267), which forms a very clear statement of his aims, 
he had said: 

I know what I am undertaking; but neither the difficulties in the 
way, nor my own limitations in skill and insight, shall hinder me from 
giving my mite for a purpose which Europe needs so much. . . . The 
most essential point from which I start is this : — Sense-impression of 
Nature is the only true foundation of human knowledge. All that 
follows is the result of this sense-impression, and the process of abstrac- 
tion from it. . . . 

Then the problem I have to solve is this : — How to bring the ele- 
ments of every art into harmony \\-ith the very nature of mind, by 
following the psychological mechanical laws by which mind rises from 
physical sense-impressions to clear ideas. 

Largely out of these ideas and the new direction he gave to in- 
struction the modern normal school for training teachers for the 
elementary schools arose. 

Oral and objective teaching developed. Up to the time of 

1 "My views of the subject," said he, "came out of a personal striving after meth- 
ods, the execution of which forced me actively and experimentally to seek, to gain, 
ind to work out what was not there, and what I yet really knew not." 



748 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Pestalozzi, and for years after he had done his work, in many 
lands and places the instruction of children continued to be of 
the memorization of textbook matter and of the recitation type. 
The children learned what was down in the book, and recited the 
answers to the teacher. Many of the early textbooks were con- 
structed on the plan of the older Catechism — that is, on a ques- 
tion and answer plan (R. 351 a). There was nothing for children 
to do but to memorize such textbook material, or for the teacher 
but to see that the pupils knew the answers to the questions. It 
was school-keeping, not teaching, that teachers were engaged in. 

The form of instruction worked out by Pestalozzi, based on 
sense-perception, reasoning, and individual judgment, called for a 
complete change in classroom procedure. What Pestalozzi tried 
most of all to do was to get children to use their senses and their 
minds, to look carefully, to count, to observe forms, to get, by 
means of their five important senses, clear impressions and ideas 
as to objects and life in the world about them, and then to think 
over what they had seen and be able to answer his questions, be- 
cause they had observed carefully and reasoned clearly. Pesta- 
lozzi thus clearly subordinated the printed book to the use of 
the child's senses, and the repetition of mere words to clear 
ideas about things. Pestalozzi thus became one of the first real 
teachers. 

This was an entirely new process, and for the first time in his- 
tory a real "technique of instruction" was now called for. De- 
pendence on the words of the text could no longer be relied upon. 
The oral instruction of a class group, using real objects, called for 
teaching skill. The class must be kept naturally interested and 
under control; the essential elements to be taught must be kept 
clearly in the mind of the teacher; the teacher must raise the right 
kind of questions, in the right order, to carry the class thinking 
along to the right conclusions; and, since so much of this type of 
instruction was not down in books, it called for a much more ex- 
tended knowledge of the subject on the part of the teacher than 
the old type of school-keeping had done. The teacher must now 
both know and be able to organize and direct. Class lessons 
must be thought out in advance, and teacher-preparation in itself 
meant a great change in teaching procedure. Emancipated from 
dependence on the words of a text, and able to stand before a class 
full of a subject and able to question freely, teachers became con- 
scious of a new strength and a professional skill unknown in the 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 749 

days of textbook reciting. Out of such teaching came oral lan- 
guage lessons, drill in speech usage, elementary science instruc- 
tion, observational geography, mental arithmetic, music, and 
drawing, to add to the old instruction in the Catechism, reading, 
writing, and ciphering, and all these new subjects, taught accord- 
ing to Pestalozzian ideas as to purpose, called for an individual 
technique of instruction. 

The normal school finds its place. These new ideas of Pesta- 
lozzi proved so important that during the first five or six decades 




Fig. 224. The First Modern Normal School 

The old castle at Yverdon, where Pestalozzi's Institute was conducted and his 
greatest success achieved. 

of the nineteenth century the elementary school was made over. 
The new conception of the child as a slowly developing personal- 
ity, demanding subject-matter and method suited to his stage of 
development, and the new conception of teaching as that of di- 
recting mental development instead of hearing recitations and 
"keeping school," now replaced the earlier knowledge-conception 
of school work. Where before the ability to organize and dis- 
cipline a school had constituted the chief art of instruction, now 
the ability to teach scientifically took its place as the prime pro- 
fessional requisite. A "science and art" of teaching now arose; 



750 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

methodology soon became a great subject; the new subject of 
pedagogy began to take form and secure recognition; and psy- 
chology became the guiding science of the school. 

As these changes took place, the normal school began to come 
into favor in the leading countries of Europe and in the United 
States, and in time has established itself everywhere as an im- 
portant educational institution. Pestalozzi had himself con- 
ducted the first really modern teacher-training school, and his 
work was soon copied in a number of the Swiss cantons. Other 
cantons, on the contrary, for a time would have nothing to do 
with the new idea. 

1. The German States. The first nation, though, to take up the 
teacher- training idea and establish it as an important part of its 
state school system was Prussia. Beginning in 1809 with the 
work of Zeller (p. 569), by 1840 there were thirty-eight Teachers' 
Seminaries, as the normal schools in German lands have been 
called, in Prussia alone. The idea was also quickly taken up by 
the other German States, and from the first decade of the nine- 
teenth century on no nation has done more with the normal 
school, or used it, ends desired considered, to better advantage 
than have the Germans. One of the features of the Prussian 
schools which most impressed Professor Bache, when he visited 
the schools of the German States in 1838, was the excellence of 
the Seminaries for Teachers (R. 344), and these he described (R. 
345) in some detail in his Report. Horace Mann, similarly, on his 
visit to Europe, in 1843, was impressed with the thoroughness of 
the training given prospective teachers in the Teachers' Seminaries 
of the German States (R. 278). University pedagogical seminars 
were also established early (c. 1810) ^ in the universities, for the 
training of secondary teachers, and this training was continued 
with increasing thoroughness up to 19 14. Every teacher in the 
German States, elementary or secondary, before that date, was a 
carefully- trained teacher. This was a feature of the German 
state school systems of the pre- War period of which no other na- 
tion could boast. 

2. France. After the German States, France probably comes 
next as the nation in which the normal school has been most used 
for training teachers. The Superior Normal School had been re- 
created in 1808 (R. 283), and after the downfall of Napoleon the 
creation of normal schools for elementary-school teachers was be- 

^ See footnote i, page 573, for places and dates. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 751 

gun. Twelve had been established by 1830, and between 1830 
and 1833 thirty additional schools for training these teachers were 
begun (R. 285). These rendered a service for France (R. 346) 
quite similar to that rendered by the Teachers' Seminaries in Ger- 
man lands. During the period of reaction, from 1848 to 1870, 
the normal school- did not prosper in France, but since 1870 a 
normal school to train elementary teachers has been established 
for men and one for women in each of the eighty-seven depart- 
ments into which France, for administrative purposes, has been 
divided. Satisfactory provision has also been made for the train- 
ing of teachers for the secondary schools. 

3. The United States. The United States has also been promi- 
nent, especially since about 1870, in the development of normal 
schools for the training of elementary teachers. The Lancastrian 
schools had trained monitors for their work, but the first teacher- 
training school in the United States to give training to individual 
teachers was opened privately,^ in 1823, and the second in a simi- 
lar manner,- in 1827. These were almost entirely academic insti- 
tutions, being in the nature of tuition high schools, with a little 
practice teaching and some lectures on the "Art of Teaching" 
added in the last year of the course. In 1826 Governor Clinton 
recommended to the legislature of New York the establishment 
by the State of "a seminary for the education of teachers in the 
monitorial system of instruction." Nothing coming of this, in 
1827 he recommended the creation of "a central school in each 
county for the education of teachers" (R. 349). That year 
(1827) the New York legislature appropriated money to aid the 
academies ''to promote the education of teachers" — the first 
state aid in the United States for teacher-training. 

The publication of an English edition of Cousin's Report 
(p. 597; R. 284) in New York, in 1835; Calvin E. Stowe's Report 
on Elementary Education in Europe,^ in 1837; and Alexander D 

^ By the Reverend Samuel R. Hall, who conducted the school as an adjunct to 
his work as a minister. The school accordingly traveled about, being held at Con- 
cord, Vermont, from 1823 to 1830; at Andover, Massachusetts, from 1830 to 1837; 
and at Plymouth, New Hampshire, from 1837 to 1840. 

'^ By James Carter, at Lancaster, Massachusetts. 

* In 1836, Calvin Stowe, a professor in the Lane Theological Seminary at Cin- 
cinnati, went to Europe to buy books for the library of the institution, and the 
legislature of Ohio commissioned him to examine and report upon the systems of 
elementary education found there. The result was his celebrated Report on Ele- 
mentary Education in Europe, made to the legislature in 1837. In it chief attention 
was given to contrasting the schools of Wiirtemberg and Prussia with those found in 
Ohio. The report was ordered printed by the legislature of Ohio, and later by the 
legislatures of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia, 
and did much to awaken American interest in advancing common school education. 



752 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



Bache's Report on Education in Europe (Rs. 344, 345), in 1838, 
with their strong commendations of the German teacher-training 
system, awakened new interest in the United States, in the matter 
of teacher-training. Finally, in 1^.39, the legislature of Massa- 
chusetts duplicated a gift of $10,000, and placed the money in the 
hands of the newly created State Board of Education (p. 689) to 
be used "in qualifying teachers for the common schools of Massa- 
chusetts" (R. 350 a). After careful consideration it was decided 
to create special state institutions, after the German and French 
plans, in which to give the desired training, and the French term 
of Normal School was adopted and has since become general in the 
United States. 

On July 3, 1839, the first state normal school in the United 
States opened in the town hall at Lexington, Massachusetts, with 



I 



n 


Z^ 


\ 




wP> 


1 1860 y 


^ 


.v^-^^=^^ 


, /^ 


1846/ \ S^ 


1 ''^ 


1313 ^j 


\ isiG y 

J (^ ^ 


1354 


• r7l845 •\n 


\ 1858 


^ 




— 


( 


/ 1851 


1846 


^ 


^ 


) 


^ 








V 


^ I 


State Normal School • 




ll 




1845 Etc. - Date of First Introduction 








of the Teach 


ers' Institute | 



Fig. 225. Teacher-Training in the United States by i860 
A few private training-schools also existed, though less than half a dozen in all. 



one teacher and three students. Later that same year a second 
state normal school was opened at Barre, and early the next year 
a third at Bridgewater, both in Massachusetts. For these the 
State Board of Education adopted a statement as to entrance re- 
quirements and a course of instruction (R. 350 b) which shows 
well the academic character of these early teaching institutions. 
Their success was largely due to the enthusiastic support given 
the new idea by Horace Mann. In an address at the dedication 
of the first building erected in America for normal-school purposes, 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 753 

in 1846, he expressed his deep belief as to the fundamental im- 
portance of such institutions (R. 350 c). By i860 eleven state 
normal schools had been established in eight of the States of the 
American Union, and six private schools were also rendering simi- 
lar services. Closely related was the Teachers' Institute, first 
definitely organized by Henry Barnard in Connecticut, in 1839, 
to offer four- to six-weeks summer courses for teachers in service, 
and these had been organized in fifteen of the American States by 
i860. Since 1870 the establishment of state normal schools has 
been rapid in the United States, two hundred having been estab- 
lished by 1910, and many since. The United States, though, is as 
yet far from having a trained body of teachers for its elementary 
schools. For the high schools, it is only since about 1890 that the 
professional training of teachers for such service has really been 
begun. 

4. England. In England the beginnings of teacher-training 
came with the introduction of monitorial instruction, both the 
Bell and the Lancaster Societies (p. 625) finding it necessary to 
train pupils for positions as monitors, and to designate certain 
schools as model and training schools. In 1833, it will be remem- 
bered (p. 638), Parliament made its first grant of money in aid of 
education. Up to 1840 this was distributed through the two Na- 
tional Societies, and in 1839 a portion of this aid was definitely set 
as'de to enable these Societies to establish model schools (R. 347). 
Prom this beginning, the model training-schools for the different 
religious Societies were developed. In these model schools pro- 
spective teachers were educated, being trained in religious in- 
struction and in the art of teaching. In 1836, with the founding 
of the "Home and Colonial Infant Society," a Pes talozzian Train- 
ing College was founded by it. 

In a further effort to secure trained teachers the government, in 
1846, adopted a plan then in use in Holland, and instituted what 
became known as the "pupil-teacher system" (R. 348). This 
was an improvement on the waning monitorial training system 
previously in use. Under this, a favorite old English method, 
used somewhat for the same purpose a century earlier (R. 243), 
was adapted to meet the new need. Under it promising pupils 
were apprenticed to a head teacher for five years (usually from 
thirteen to eighteen), he agreeing to give them instruction in both 
secondary-school subjects and in the art of teaching in return for 
^eir help in the schoolroom. Begirming in 1846, there were, by 



754 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

1848, 200 pupil teachers; by 1861, 13,871; and by 1870, 14,612. 
This system formed the great dependence of England before the 
days of national education. In 1874 the pupil-teacher-center 
system was begun, and between 1878 and 1896 the age for enter- 
ing as a pupil- teacher was raised from thirteen to sixteen, and the 
years of apprenticeship reduced from five to two. In most cases 
now the academic preparation continues to seventeen or eighteen, 
and is followed by one year of practice teaching in an elementary 
school, under supervision. After that the teacher may, or may 
not, enter what is there known as a Training-College.^ So far the 
training of teachers has not made such headway in England and 
Wales as has been the case in the German States, France, the 
United States, or Scotland, but important progress may be ex- 
pected in the near future as an outcome of new educational im- 
pulses arising as a result of the World War. 

Spread of the normal-school idea. The movement for the 
creation of normal schools to train teachers for the elementary 
schools has in time spread to many nations. As nation after na- 
tion has awakened to the desirability of establishing a system of 
modern-type state schools, a normal school to train leaders has 
often been among the first of the institutions created. The 
normal school, in consequence, is found to-day in all the conti- 
nental European States; in all the English self-governing domin- 
ions; in nearly all the South American States; and in China,^ 
Japan, Siam, the Philippines, Cuba, Algiers, India, and other less 
important nations. In all these there is an attempt, often reach- 
ing as yet to but a small percentage of the teachers, to extend to 
them some of that training in the theory and art of instruction 
which has for long been so important a feature of the education of 
the elementary teacher in the German States, France, and the 
United States. Since about 1890 other nations have also begun 
to provide, as the German States and France have done for so 

^ These are higher institutions which offer two, three, or four years of academic 
and some professional education, and may be found in connection with a university, 
may be maintained by city or county school authorities; or may be voluntary insti- 
tutions. In 1910-11 there were eighty-three such institutions in England and 
Wales. 

2 In China, for example, as soon as the new general system of education had been 
decided upon, normal schools of three types — higher normal schools, lower normal 
schools, and teacher-training schools — were created, and missionary teachers, for- 
eign teachers, and students returning from abroad were used to staff these new 
schools. By 1910 as many as thirty higher normal schools, two hundred and three 
lower normal schools, and a hundred and eighty-two training classes had been 
estabHshed in China under government auspices. (Ping Wen Kuo, The Chinese 
System of Public Education, p. 156.) 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 755 

long, some form of professional training for the teachers intended 
for their secondary schools ^ as well. 

Psychology becomes the master science. Everywhere the es- 
tablishment of normal schools has meant the acceptance of the 
newer conceptions as to child development and the nature of the 
educational process. These are that the child is a slowly develop- 
ing personahty, needing careful study, and demanding subject- 
matter and method suited to his different stages of developmen*!. 
The new conception of teaching as that of directing and guiding 
the education of a child, instead of hearing recitations and ^'keep- 
ing school," in time replaced the earlier knowledge-conception of 
school work. Psychology accordingly became the guiding science 
of the school, and the imparting to prospective teachers proper 
ideas as to psychological procedure, and the proper methodology 
of instruction in each of the different elementary-school subjects, 
became the great work of the normal school. Teachers thu''^ 
trained carried into the schools a new conception as to the nature 
of childhood; a new and a minute methodology of instruction; 
and a new enthusiasm for teaching; — all of which were impor- 
tant additions to school work. 

A new methodology was soon worked out for all the subjects 
of instruction, both old and new. The centuries-old alphabet 
method of teaching reading was superseded by the word and 
sound methods ; the new oral language instruction was raised to a 
position of first importance in developing pupil- thinking; spelling, 
word- analysis, and sentence-analysis were given much emphasis 
in the work of the school; the Pestalozzian mental arithmetic 
came as an important addition to the old ciphering of sums ; the 
old writing from copies was changed into a drill subject, requiring 
careful teaching for its mastery; the "back to nature" ideas of 
Rousseau and Pestalozzi proved specially fruitful in the new study 
of geography, which called for observation out of doors, the study 
of type forms, and the substitution of the physical and human 
aspects of geography for the older political and statistical; object 
lessons on natural objects, and later science and nature study, 
were used to introduce children to a knowledge of nature and to 
train them in thinking and observation ; while the new subjects of 
music and drawing came in, each with an elaborate technique of 
instruction. 

^ The beginnings in the United States date from about 1890, and in England even 
tater. In France, on the other hand, the training of teachers for the secondary 
dchools goes back to the days of Napoleon. 



756 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



By 1875 the normal school in all lands was finding plenty to do, 
and teaching, by the new methods and according to the new psy- 
chological procedure, seemed to many one of the most wonderful 
and most important occupations in the world. How great a 
change in the scope, as well as in the nature of elementary-school 



2775 


1825 


1850 


187S 


READING 

Spelling 
Writing 
Catechism 
1 BIBLE 

Arithmetic 


(READING* 

( Declamation 
SPELLING * 

Writing 
j Oood Behavior 
\ Manners & Morals 

ARITHMETIC* 


( READING 

1 DECLAMATION 

SPELLING 

WRITING 
( Manners 
( Conduct 

(MENTAL ARITH* 
} CIPHERING 


I READING 

I Literary Selectiorit 

SPELLING 

PENMANSHIP* 

Conduct 

j PRIMARY ARITH.* 
\ ADVANCED ARITH. 




Bookkeeping 
GRAMMAR 

Geography 


Bookkeeping 
j Elem. Language 
\ GRAMMAR 

Oeography 
History U.S. 


( Oral Language • 

i GRAMMAR 

j Home Geography • 

\ TEXT GEOGRAPHY 

f U.S. HISTORY 

\ Constitution 




Sewing aad Knit* 
ting 


Object Lessons 


( Object Lessons * 
( Elementary Science * 

Drawing * 

Music* 

Physical Exercises 



CAPITALS =: Hoit Jmportast anbjeots. Italics = Snbjeets of medlacn importance. 1 
Boman = Leaat Important oubjecU. * = Now metbods of t«aehi&g now employed. 1 



Fig. 226. Evolution of the Elementary-School Curriculum 
AND OF Methods of Teaching 

instruction had been effected in a century, the above diagram of 
American elementary-school development will reveal. History 
and literature, it will be noticed, had also come in as addi- 
tional new subjects, but these were relatively unimportant in 
either the elementary school or the normal school until after 
the coming of Herbartian ideas, to which we shall refer a Uttle 
further on. 

Accompanying the organization of professional instruction for 
teachers, another important change in the nature of the elemen- 
tary school was effected. 

The grading of schoolroom instruction. For some time after 
elementary schools began it was common to teach all the children 
of the different ages together in one room, or at most in two 
rooms. In the latter case the subjects of instruction were divided 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 757 

between the teachers, rather than the children.^ Many of the pic- 
tures of early elementary schools show such mixed-type schools. 
In these the children were advanced individually and by subjects 
as their progress warranted,^ until they had progressed as far a£ 
the instruction went or the teacher could teach (R. 352). From 
this point on the division of the elementary school into classes and 
a graded organization has proceeded by certain rather well-de- 
fined steps. 

The first step (Rs. 353, 354) was the division of the school into 
two schools, one more advanced than the othe/, such as lower 
and higher, or primary and grammar. Another division was in- 
troduced when the Infant School was added, beneath. The next 
step was the division of each school into classes. This began by 
the employment of assistant teachers, in England and America 
known as "ushers," to help the "master," and the provision of 
small recitation rooms, off the main large schoolroom, to which 
the usher could take his class to hear recitations. The third and 
final step came with the erection of a new type of school building, 
with smaller and individual classrooms, or the subdivision of the 
larger schoolrooms. It was then possible to assign a teacher to 
each classroom, sort and grade the pupils by ages and advance- 
ment, outline the instruction by years, and the modern graded 
elementary school was at hand. 

The transition to the graded elementary school came easily and 
naturally. For half a century the course of instruction in the 
evolving elementary state school had been in process of expan- 
sion. Pestalozzi paved the way for its creation by changing the 
purpose and direction, and greatly enlarging (p. 543) the field of 

^ A common division was between the teacher who taught reading, religion, and 
spelHng, and the teacher who taught writing and arithmetic (R. 307). Writing be- 
ing considered a difiBcult art, this was taught by a separate teacher, who often in- 
cluded the ability to teach arithmetic also among his accomplishments. 

^ A good example of this may be found in the monitorial schools. The New York 
Free School Society (p. 660), for example, reported in its Fourteenth Annual Report 
(1819) that the children in its schools had pursued studies as follows: 
297 children have been taught to form letters in sand. 
615 have been advanced from letters in sand to monosyllabic reading on 

boards. 
686 from reading on boards, to Murray's First Book. 
335 from Murray's First Book, to writing on slates. 
218 from writing on slates, to writing on paper. 
341 to reading in the Bible. 
277 to addition and subtraction. 
153 to multiplication and division. 
60 to the compound of the four first rules. 
20 to reduction. 
24 to the rule of three. 



758 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



instruction of the vernacular school. After him other new sub- 
jects of study were added (see diagram, Figure 226), new and bet- 
ter and longer textbooks were prepared (R. 351), and the school 




Fig. 227. An "Usher" and His Class 

The usher, or assistant teacher, is here shown with a class in one of the 
small recitation-rooms, ofif the large schoolroom. 



term was gradually lengthened. The way in time became clear, 
earliest in the German lands and in a few American cities, but by 
about 1850 in most leading nations, for that simple reorganiza- 
tion of school work which would divide the school into a number 
of classes, or forms, or grades, and give one to each teacher to 
handle. When this point had been reached, which came about 
1850 to i860 in most nations, but earlier in a few, the modern 
type of town or city graded elementary school was at hand. 
Teaching had by this time become an organized and a psychologi- 
cal process; graded courses of study began to appear; professional 
school superintendents began to be given the direction and super- 
vision of instruction; and the modern science of school organiza- 
tion and administration began to take shape. From this point on 
the further development of the graded elementary public school 
has come through the addition of new materials of instruction, 
and by changing the direction of the school to adapt it better to 
meeting the new needs of society brought about by the scientific, 
industrial, social, and political revolutions which we, in previous 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 759 

chapters, have described, A few of the more important of these 
additions and changes in direction we shall now briefly describe. 

II. NEW IDEAS FROM HERBARTIAN SOURCES 

The work of Herbart. Taking up the problem as Pestalozzi 
left it, a German by the name of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776- 
1841) carried it forward by organizing a truer psychology for the 
whole educational process, by erecting a new social aim for in- 
struction, by formulating new steps in method, and by showing 
the place and the importance of properly organized instruction in 
history and literature in the education of the child. Though the 
two men were entirely different in type, and worked along en- 
tirely different lines, the connection between Herbart and Pesta- 
lozzi was, nevertheless, close. ^ 

The two men, however, approached the educational problem 
from entirely different angles. Pestalozzi gave nearly all his long 
life to teaching and human service, while Herbart taught only as 
a traveling private tutor for three years, and later a class of 
twenty children in his university practice school. Pestalozzi was 
a social reformer, a visionary, and an impractical enthusiast, bu|. 
was possessed of a remarkable intuitive insight into child nature 
Herbart, on the other hand, was a well- trained scholarly thinker, 
who spent the most of his life in the peaceful occupation of a pro- 
fessor of philosophy in a German university. ^ It was while at 
Konigsberg, between 18 10 and 1832, and as an appendix to his 
work as professor of philosophy, that he organized a small prac- 
tice school, conducted a Pedagogical Seminar, and worked out his 
educational theory and method. His work was a careful, schol- 
arly attempt at the organization of education as a science, carried 
out amid the peace and quiet which a un^'versity atmosphere al- 
most alone affords. He addressed himself chiefly to three things: 
(i) the aim, (2) the content, and (3) the method of instruction. 

The aim and the content of education. Locke had set up as 

^ Herbart had visited Pestalozzi at Burgdorf, in 1799, just after graduating from 
Jena and while acting as a tutor for three Swiss boys, aiid had written a very sympa- 
thetic description of his school and his theory of instruction. Herbart was one of the 
first of the Germans to understand and appreciate " the genial and noble Pesta- 
lozzi." 

2 The son of a well-educated pubHc official, Herbart was himself educated at the 
Gymnasium of Oldenburg and the University of Jena. After spending three years as 
a tutor, he became, at the age of twenty-six, an under teacher at the University of 
Gottingen. At the age of thirty-three he was called to succeed Kant as professor of 
philosophy at Konigsberg, and from the age of fifty-seven to his death at sixty-five 
he was again a professor at Gottingen. 



760 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

the aim of education the ideal of a physically sound gentleman. 
Rousseau had declared his aim to be to prepare his boy for life 
by developing naturally his inborn capacities. Pestalozzi had 
sought to regenerate society by means of education, and to pre- 
pare children for society by a "harmonious training" of their 
"faculties." Herbart rejected alike the conventional-social edu- 
cation of Locke, the natural and unsocial education of Rousseau, 
and the " faculty -psychology " conception of education of Pesta- 
lozzi. Instead he conceived of the mind as a unity, instead of be- 
ing divided into "faculties," and the aim of education as broadly 
social rather than personal. The purpose of education, he said, 
was to prepare men to live properly in organized society, and 
hence the chief aim in education was not conventional fitness, 
natural development, mere knowledge, nor personal mental 
power, but personal character and social morality. This being 
the case, the educator should analyze the interests and occupa- 
tions and social responsibilities of men as they are grouped in or- 
ganized society, and, from such analyses, deduce the means and 
the method of instruction. Man's interests, he said, come from 
two main sources — his contact with the things in his environ- 
, ment (real things, sense-impressions), and from his relations with 
//human beings (social intercourse). His social responsibilities and 
duties are determined by the nature of the social organization of 
which he forms a part. 

Pestalozzi had provided fairly well for the first group of con- 
tacts, through his instruction in objects, home geography, num- 
bers, and geometric form. For the second group of contacts 
Pestalozzi had developed only oral language, and to this Herbart 
now added the two important studies of literature and history, 
and history with the emphasis on the social rather than the politi- 
cal side. Two new elementary-school subjects were thus devel- 
oped, each important in revealing to man his place in the social 
whole. History in particular Herbart conceived to be a study of 
the first importance for revealing proper human relationships, 
and leading men to social and national "good- will." 

The chief purpose of education Herbart held to be to develop 
personal character and to prepare for social usefulness (R. 355)- 
These virtues, he held, proceeded from enough of the right kind of 
knowledge, properly interpreted to the pupil so that clear ideas as 
to relationships might be formed. To impart this knowledge in- 
terest must be awakened, and to arouse interest in the many kinds 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 761 

of knowledge needed, a "many-sided" development must take 
place. From full knowledge, and with proper instruction by the 
teacher, clear ideas or concepts might be formed, and clear ideas 
ought to lead to right action, and right action to personal charac- 
ter — the aim of all instruction. Herbart was the first writer on 
education to place the great emphasis on proper instruction, and 
to exalt teaching and proper teaching-procedure instead of mere 
knowledge or intellectual discipline. He thus conceived of the 
educational process as a science in itself, having a definite content 
and method, and worthy of special study by those who desire to 
teach. 

Herbartian method. With these ideas as to the aim and con- 
tent of instruction, Herbart worked out a theory of the instruc- 
tional process and a method of instruction (R. 356). Interest he 
held to be of first importance as a prerequisite to good instruc- 
tion. If given spontaneously, well and good; but, if necessary, 
forced interest must be resorted to. Skill in instruction is in part 
to be determined by the ability of the teacher to secure interest 
without resorting to force on the one hand or sugar-coating of the 
subject on the other. Taking Pestalozzi's idea that the purpose 
of the teacher was to give pupils new experiences through contacts 
with real things, without assuming that the pupils already had 
such, Herbart elaborated the process by which new knowledge is 
assimilated in terms of what one already knows, and from his 
elaboration of this principle the doctrine of apperception — that 
is, the apperceiving or comprehending of new knowledge in terms 
of the old — has been fixed as an important principle in educa- 
tional psychology. Good instruction, then, involves first putting 
the^ child into a proper frame of mind to apperceive the new 
Knowledge, and hence this becomes a corner-stone of all good 
teaching method. 

Herbart did not always rely on such methods, holding that the 
"committing to memory" of certain necessary facts often was 
necessary, but he held that the mere memorizing of isolated facts, 
which had characterized school instruction for ages, had little 
value for either educational or moral ends. The teaching of mere 
facts often was very necessary, but such instruction called for a 
methodical organization of the facts by the teacher, so as to make 
their learning contribute to some definite purpose. This called 
for a purpose in instruction; the organization of the facts neces- 
sary to be taught so as to select the most useful ones ; the connec- 



762 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tion of these so as to establish the principle which was the purpose 
of the instruction ; and training in systematic thinking by apply- 
ing the principle to new problems of the type being studied. The 
carrying-out of such ideas meant the careful organization of the 
teaching process and teaching method, to secure certain prede- 
termined ends in child development, instead of mere miscella- 
neous memorizing and school-keeping. 

The Herbartian movement in Germany. Herbart died in 1841, 
without having awakened any general interest in his ideas, and 
they remained virtually unnoticed until 1865. In that year a pro- 
fessor at Leipzig, Tuiskon Ziller (1817-1883), published a book 
setting forth Herbart's idea of instruction as a moral force. This 
attracted much attention, and led to the formation (1868) of a 
scientific society for the study of Herbart's ideas. Ziller and his 
followers now elaborated Herbart's ideas, advanced the theory of 
culture-epochs in child development, the theory of concentration 
in studies, and elaborated the four steps in the process of in- 
struction, as described by Herbart, into the five formal steps 
of the modern Herbartian school. 

In 1874 a pedagogical seminary and practice school was organ- 
ized at the University of Jena, and in 1885 this came under the 
direction of Professor William Rein, a pupil of Ziller's, who de 
veloped the practice school according to the ideas of Ziller. A 
detailed course of study for this school, filling two large volumes, 
was worked out, and the practice lessons given were thoroughly 
planned beforehand and the methods employed were subjected to 
a searching analysis after the lesson had been given. 

Herbartian ideas in the United States. For a time, under the 
inspiration of Ziller and Rein, Jena became an educational center 
to which students went from many lands. From the work at Jena 
Herbartian ideas have spread which have modified elementary 
educational procedure generally. In particular did the work at 
Jena make a deep impression in the United States. Between 1885 
and 1890 a number of Americans studied at Jena and, returning, 
brought back to the United States this Ziller-Rein-Jena brand of 
Herbartian ideas and practices.^ From the first the new ideas 
met with enthusiastic approval. 

^ Charles De Garmo's Essentials of Method, published in 1889, marked the be- 
ginning of the introduction of these ideas into this country. In 1892 Charles A. 
McMurry published his General Method, and in 1897, with his brother, Frank, pub- 
lished the Method in the Recitation. These three books probably have done more to 
popularize Herbartian ideas and mtroduce them into the normal schools and col- 
leges of the United States than all other influences combined. Another important 





^ • - 






« 



<u 



1. 1 

a 
o 



bO 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 763 

New methods of instruction in history and literature, and a 
new psychology, were now added to the normal-school profes- 
sional instruction. Though this psychology has since been out- 
grown (R. 357), it has been very useful in shaping pedagogical 
thought. New courses of study for the training-schools were now 
worked out in which the elementary-school subjects were divided 
into drill subjects, content subjects, and motor-activity subjects.^ 
Apperception, interest, correlation, social purpose, moral educa- 
tion, citizenship training, and recitation methods became new 
terms to conjure with. From the normal schools these ideas 
spread rapidly to the better city school systems o^ the time, and 
soon found their way into courses of study everywhere. Practice 
schools and the model lessons in dozens of normal schools were re- 
modeled after the pattern of those at Jena, and for a decade Her- 
bartian ideas and the new child study vied with one another for 
the place of first importance in educational thinking. The Her- 
bartian wave of the nineties resembled the Pestalozzian 'enthu- 
siasm of the sixties. Each for a time furnished the new ideas in 
education, each introduced elements of importance into the ele- 
mentary-school instruction, each deeply influenced the training of 
teachers in normal schools by giving a new turn to the instruction 
there, and each gradually settled down into its proper place in 
educational practice and history. 

The Herbartian contribution. To the Herbartians we are in- 
debted in particular for important new conceptions as to the 
teaching of history and literature, which have modified all our 
subsequent procedure; for the introduction of history teaching in 
some form into all the elementary-school grades; for the emphasis 
on a new social point of view in the teaching of history and geog- 
raphy; for the new emphasis on the moral aim in instruction; for a 
new and a truer educational psychology; and for a better organi- 
zation of the technique of classroom instruction. In particular 

influence was the "National Herbart Society," founded in 1892 by students return- 
ing from Jena, in imitation of the similar German society. 

^ The studies which have come to characterize the modern elementary school 
may now be classified under the following headings: 



Drill subjects 


Content subjects 


Expression subjects 


Reading 


Literature 


Kindergarten Work 


Writing 


Geography 


Music 


Spelling 


History 


Manual Arts 


Language 


Civic Studies 


Domestic Arts 


Arithmetic 


Manners and Conduct 


Plays and Games 




Nature Study 


School Gardening 




Agriculture 


Vocational Subjects 



764 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Herbart gave emphasis to that part of educational development 
which comes from without — environment acting upon the child 

— as contrasted with the emphasis Pestalozzi had placed on men- 
tal development from within and according to organic law. With 
the introduction of normal child activities, which came from 
another source about this same time, the elementary-school cur- 
riculum as we now have it was practically complete, and the ele- 
mentary school of 1850 was completely made over to form the 
elementary school of the beginning of the twentieth century. 

III. THE KINDERGARTEN, PLAY, AND MANUAL ACTIVITIES 

To another German, Friedrich Froebel (178 2- 1852), we are in- 
debted, directly or indirectly, for three other additions to ele- 
mentary education — the kindergarten, the play idea, and hand- 
work activities. 

Origin of the kindergarten. Of German parentage, the son of a 
rural clergyman, early estranged from his parents, retiring and 
introspective by nature, having led a most unhappy childhood, 
and apprenticed to a forester without his wishes being consulted, 
at twenty-three Froebel decided to become a schoolteacher and 
visited Pestalozzi in Switzerland. Two years later he became the 
tutor of three boys, and then spent the years 1808-10 as a student 
and teacher in Pestalozzi's Institute at Yverdon. During his 
years there Froebel was deeply impressed with the great value of 
music and play in the education of children, and of all that he 
carried away from Pestalozzi's institution these ideas were most 
persistent. After serving in a variety of occupations — student, 
soldier against Napoleon, and curator in a museum of mineralogy 

— he finally opened a little private school, in 181 6, which he con- 
ducted for a decade along Pestalozzian lines. In this the play 
idea, music, and the self-activity of the pupils were uppermost. 
The school was a failure, financially, but while conducting it 
Froebel thought out and pubUshed (1826) his most important 
pedagogical work — The Education of Man. 

Gradually Froebel became convinced that the most needed re- 
form in education concerned the early years of childhood. His 
own youth had been most unhappy, and to this phase of education 
he now addressed himself. After a period as a teacher in Switzer- 
land he returned to Germany and opened a school for little chil- 
dren in which plays, games, songs, and occupations involving self- 
activity were the dominating characteristics, and in 1840 he hit 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 765 

upon the name Kindergarten for it. In 1843 his Mutter- und 
Kose-Lieder, a book of fifty songs and games, was published. 
This has been translated into almost all languages. 

Spread of the kindergarten idea. After a series of unsuccessful 
efforts to bring his new idea to the attention of educators, Froebel, 
himself rather a feminine type, became discouraged and resolved 
to address himself henceforth to women, as they seemed much 
more capable of understanding him, and to the training of teach- 
ers in the new ideas. Froebel was fortunate in securing as one of 
his most ardent disciples, just before his death, the Baroness 
Bertha von Marenholtz Biilow-Wendhausen (1810-93), who did 
more than any other person to make his work known. Meeting, 
in 1849, the man mentioned to her as "an old fool," she under- 
stood him, and spent the remainder of her life in bringing to the 
attention of the world the work of this unworldly man who did 
not know how to make it known for himself. In 1851 the Prus- 
sian Government, fearing some revolutionary designs in the new 
idea, and acting in a manner thoroughly characteristic of the po- 
litical reaction which by that time had taken hold of all German 
official life, forbade kindergartens in Prussia. The Baroness then 
went to London and lectured there on Froebel's ideas, organizing 
kindergartens in the English "ragged schools." Here, by con- 
trast, she met with a cordial reception. She later expounded 
Froebelian ideas in Paris, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, 
and (after i860, when the prohibition was removed) in Germany. 
In 1870 she founded a kindergarten training-college in Dresden. 
Many of her writings have been translated into English, and pub- 
lished in the United States. 

Considering the importance of this work, and the time which 
has since elapsed, the kindergarten idea has made relatively 
small progress on the continent of Europe. Its spirit does not 
harmojiize with autocratic government. In Germany and the 
old Austro-Hungary it had made but little progress up to 19 14. 
Its greatest progress in Europe, perhaps, has been in democratic 
Switzerland.^ In England and France, the two great leaders in 
democratic government, the Infant-School development, which 
came earlier, has prevented any marked growth of the kinder- 

^ Next, perhaps, would come Italy, which is strongly democratic in spirit. In 
the cities of Holland one finds many privately supported kindergartens, but the 
State has not made them a part of the school system. In Norway and Sweden the 
kindergarten practically does not exist. The kindergarten will always do best 
among self-governing peoples, and seldom meets with favor from autocratic power. 



766 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

garten. In England, though, the Infant School has recently been 
entirely transformed by the introduction into it of the kinder- 
garten spirit.^ In France, infant education has taken a some- 
what different direction.^ 

In the United States the kindergarten idea has met with a most 
cordial reception. In no country in the world has the spirit of the 
kindergarten been so caught and applied to school work, and 
probably nowhere has the original kindergarten idea been so ex- 
panded and improved.^ The first kindergarten in the United 
States was a German kindergarten, established at Watertown, 
Wisconsin, in 1855, by Mrs. Carl Schurz, a pupil of Froebel. 
During the next fifteen years some ten other kindergartens were 
organized in German-speaking communities. The first English- 
speaking kindergarten was opened privately in Boston, in i860, 
by Miss Elizabeth Peabody. In 1868 a private training-college 
for kindergartners was opened in Boston, largely through Miss 
Peabody's influence, by Madame Matilde Kriege and her daugh- 
ter, who had recently arrived from Germany. In 1872 Miss 
Marie Boelte opened a similar teacher- training school in New 
York City, and in 1873 her pupil, Miss Susan Blow, accepted the 
invitation of Superintendent William T. Harris, of St. Louis, to go 
there and open the first public-school kindergarten in the United 
States.4 

1 " In the best English Infant Schools a profound revolution has taken place in 
recent years. Formal lessons in the 3 Rs have disappeared, and the whole of the 
training of the little ones has been based on the principles of the kindergarten as 
enunciated by Froebel. Much of the old routine still remains; nevertheless there is 
no part of the English educational system so brimful of real promise as the work 
that is now being done in the best Infant Schools." (Hughes, R. E., The Making of 
Citizens (1902), p. 40.) 

^ In France, the Infant School or kindergarten is known as the Maternal School. 
Pupils are received at two years of age, and carried along until six. In the lower 
division the school is largely in the nature of a day nursery, but in the upper division 
many of the features of the kindergarten are found. 

* Since Froebel's day we have learned much about children that was then un- 
known, especially as to the muscular and nervous organization and development of 
children, and with this new knowledge the tendency has been to enlarge the "gifts" 
and change their nature, to introduce new "occupations," elaborate the kindergar- 
ten program of daily exercises, and to give the kindergarten more of an out-of-door 
character. Especially has the work of Dewey (p. 780) and the child-study special- 
ists been important in modifying kindergarten procedure. 

* By 1880 some 300 kindergartens and 10 kindergarten training-schools, mostly 
private undertakings, had been opened in the cities of thirty of the States of the 
Union. By 1890 philanthropic kindergarten associations to provide and support 
kindergartens had been organized in most of the larger cities, and after that date 
cities rapidly began to adopt the kindergarten as a part of the public-school system, 
and thus add, at the bottom, one more rung to the American educational ladder. 
To-day there are approximately 9000 public and 1 500 private kindergartens in the 
cities of the United States, and training in kindergarten principles and practices is 
now given by many of the state normal schools. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 767 

To-day the kindergarten is found in some form in nearly all 
countries in the world, having been carried to all continents by 
missionaries, educational enthusiasts, and interested govern- 
ments.^ Japan early adopted the idea, and China is now begin- 
ning to do so. 

The kindergarten idea. The dominant idea in the kindergar- 
ten is natural but directed self-activity, focused upon educational, 
social, and moral ends. Froebel believed in the continuity of a 
child's life from infancy onward, and that self-activity, deter- 
mined by the child's interests and desires and intelligently di- 
rected, was essential to the unfolding of the child's inborn capaci- 
ties. He saw, more clearly than any one before him had done, 
the unutilized wealth of the child's world; that the child's chief 
characteristic is self-activity; the desirability of the child finding 
himself through play; and that the work of the school during 
these early years was to supplement the family by drawing out 
the child and awakening the ideal side of his nature. To these 
ends doing, self-activity, and expression became fundamental to 
the kindergarten, and movement, gesture, directed play, song, 
color, the story, and human activities a part of kindergarten 
technique. Nature study and school gardening were given a 
prominent place, and motor-activity much called into play. Ad- 
vancing far beyond Pestalozzi's principle of sense-impressions, 
Froebel insisted on motor-activity and learning by doing (R. 358). 

Froebel, as well as Herbart, also saw the social importance of 
education, and that man must realize himself not independently 
amid nature, as Rousseau had said, but as a social animal in coop- 
eration with his fellowmen. Hence he made his schoolroom a 
miniature of society, a place where courtesy and helpfulness and 
social cooperation were prominent features. This social and at 
times reverent atmosphere of the kindergarten has always been a 
marked characteristic of its work. To bring out social ideas many 
dramatic games, such as shoemaker, carpenter, smith, and 
farmer, were devised and set to music. The "story" by the 
teacher was made prominent, and this was retold in language, 
acted, sung, and often worked out constructively in clay, blocks, 
or paper. Other games to develop skill were worked out, and 
use was made of sand, clay, paper, cardboard, and color. The 

1 In 19 18. for example, according to a recent Report to the Zionist Board of Edu- 
cation in the United States, there were over 5300 children in kindergartens in Pales- 
tine, 125 kindergarten teachers there, and a College for Kindergarten Teachers had 
been organized in the Holy Land to train additional teachers. 



768 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

" gifts''^ and "occupations" which Froebel devised were intended 
to develop constructive and aesthetic power, and to provide for 
connection and development they were arranged into an organ- 
ized series of playthings. Individual development as its aim, 
motor-expression as its method, and social cooperation as its 
means were the characteristic ideas of this new school for little 
children (R. 358). 

The contribution of the kindergarten. Wholly aside from the 
specific training given children during the year, year and a half, 
or two years they spend in this type of school, the addition of the 
kindergarten to elementary-school work has been a force of very 
large significance and usefulness. The idea that the child is 
primarily an active and not a learning animal has been given new 
emphasis, and that education comes chiefly by doing has been 
given new force. The idea that a child's chief business is play has 
been a new conception of large educational value. The elimina- 
tion of book education and harsh discipline in the kindergarten 
has been an idea that has slowly but gradually been extended up- 
ward into the lower grades of the elementary school. 

To-day, largely as a result of the spreading of the kindergarten 
spirit, the world is coming to recognize play and games at some- 
thing like their real social, moral, and educational values, wholly 
aside from their benefits as concern physical welfare, and in many 
places directed play is being scheduled as a regular subject in 
school programs. Music, too, has attained new emphasis since 
the coming of the kindergarten, and methods of teaching music 
more in harmony with kindergarten ideas have been introduced 
into the schools. 

Instruction in the manual activities. Froebel not only intro- 
duced constructive work — paper-folding, weaving, needlework, 
and work with sand and clay and color ■ — into the kindergarten, 
but he also proposed to extend and develop such work for the up- 
per years of schooling in a school for hand training which he out- 
hned, but did not establish. His proposed plan included the ele- 
ments of the so-called manual-training idea, developed later, and 
he justified such instruction on the same educational grounds 
that we advance to-day. It was not to teach a boy a trade, as 
Rousseau had advocated, or to train children in sense-perception, 
as Pestalozzi had employed all his manual activities, but as a 
form of educational expression, and for the purpose of developing 
^creative power within the child. The idea was advocated by a 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 769 

number of thinkers, about 1850 to i860, but the movement took 
its rise in Finland, Sweden, and Russia, 

The first country to organize such work as a part of its school 
instruction was Finland, where, as early as 1858, Uno Cygnaeus 
(1810-1888) outlined a course for manual training involving 
bench and metal work, wood-carving, and basket-weaving. In 
1866 Finland made some form of manual work compulsory for 
boys in all its rural schools, and in its training-colleges for male 
teachers. In 1872 the government of Sweden decided to intro- 
duce sloyd work into its schools, partly to counteract the bad 
physical and moral effects of city congestion, and partly to re- 
vivify the declining home industries of the people. A sloyd 
school was established at Naas, in 1872, to train teachers, and in 
1875 a second school, known as a "Sloyd Seminarium," was be- 
gun. The summer courses of these two schools were soon training 
teachers from many nations. In 1877 sloyd work was added to 
the Folk School instruction of Sweden. At first the old native 
sloyd occupations were followed, such as carpentering, turning, 
wood-carving, brush-making, book-binding, and work in copper 
and iron, but later the industrial element gave way to a well- 
organized course in educational tool work for boys from twelve to 
fifteen years of age, after the Finnish plan. 

Spread of the manual-training idea. France was the first of 
the larger European nations to adopt this new addition to ele- 
mentary-school instruction, a training-school being organized at 
Paris in 1873, and, in 1882, the instruction in manual activities 
was ordered introduced into all the primary schools of France, 
It has required time, though, to provide work rooms and to realize 
this idea, and it is still lacking in complete accomplishment. In 
England the work was first introduced in London, about 1887. 
The government at once accepted the idea, encouraged its spread, 
and began to aid in the training of teachers. By 1900 the work 
was found in all the larger cities, and included cooking and sewing 
for girls, as well as manual work for boys. The training for girls 
goes back still farther, and was an outgrowth of the earlier 
"schools of industry " established to train girls for domestic serv- 
ice (R. 241). By 1846 instruction in needlework had been begun 
in earnest in England. In German lands needlework was also 
an early school subject, while some domestic training for girls 
had been provided in most of the cities, before 1914. Manual 
training for boys, though, despite much propaganda work, had 



770 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

made but little headway up to that time. As in the case of the 
kindergarten, the initiative and self-expression aspects of the 
manual-training movement made no appeal to those responsible 
for the work of the people's schools, and, in consequence, the 
manual activities have in German lands been reserved largely for 
the continuation and vocational schools for older pupils. 

In the United States the manual-training and household-arts 
ideas have found a very ready welcome. Curious as it may seem, 
the first introduction to the United States of this new form of in- 
struction came through the exhibit made by the Russian govern- 
ment at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, showing the work in 
wood and iron made by the pupils at the Imperial Technical In- 
stitute at Moscow. This, however, was not the Swedish sloyd, 
but a type of work especially adapted to secondary-school in- 
struction. In consequence the movement for instruction in the 
manual activities in the United States, unlike in other nations, 
began as a highly organized technical type of high-school instruc- 
tion,^ while the elementary-school sloyd and the household arts 
for girls came in later. This type of technical high school has 
since developed rapidly in this country, has rendered an impor- 
tant educational service, and is a peculiarly American creation. 
In Europe the manual-training idea has been confined to the ele- 
mentary school, and no institution exists there which parallels 
these costly and well-equipped American technical secondary 
schools. 

The introduction of manual work into the elementary schools 
came a little later, and a little more slowly. As early as 1880 the 
Workingmen's School, founded by the Ethical Culture Society of 
New York, had provided a kindergarten and had extended the 
kindergarten constructive-work idea upward, in the form of sim- 
ple woodworking, into its elementary school. In the public 
schools, experimental classes in elementary-school woodworking 
were tried in one school in Boston, as early as 1882, the expense 
being borne privately. In 1888 the city took over these classes. 

^ The Saint Louis Manual Training High School, founded in 1880 in connection 
with Washington University, first gave expression to this new form of education, 
and formed a type for the organization of such schools elsewhere. Privately sup- 
ported schools of this type were organized in Chicago, Toledo, Cincinnati, and 
Cleveland before 1886, and the first public manual-training high schools were estab- 
lished in Baltimore in 1884, Philadelphia in 1885, and Omaha in 1886. The shop- 
work, based for long on the "Russian system," included wood-turning, joinery, pat- 
tern-making, forging, foundry and machine work. The first high school to provide 
sewing, cooking, dressmaking, and millinery for girls was the one at Toledo, estab- 
lished in 1886, though private classes had been organized earlier in a number of cities. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 771 

In 1886 a teacher was brought to Boston from Sweden to intro- 
duce Swedish sloyd, and a teacher-training school which has been 
very influential was established there, in 1889. In 1876 Massa- 
chusetts permitted cities to provide instruction in sewing, and 
Springfield introduced such instruction in 1884, and elementary- 
school instruction in knifework in 1886. 

From these beginnings the movement spread,^ though at first 
rather slowly. By 1900 approximately forty cities, nearly all of 
them in the North Atlantic group of States, had introduced work 
in manual training and the 
household arts into their ele- 
mentary schools, but since 
that time the work has been 
extended to practically all 
cities, and to many towns 
and rural communities as 
well. 

Contribution of the man- 
ual-activities idea. These 
new forms of school work 
were at first advocated on 
the grounds of formal dis- 
cipline — that they trained 
the reasoning, exercised the 
powers of observation, and 
strengthened the will. The 
"exercises," true to such 
a conception, were quite 
formal and uniform for all. 
With the breakdown of the ''faculty psychology," and the 
abandonment in large part of the doctrine of formal discipline in 
the training of the mind, the whole manual-training and house- 
hold-arts work has had to be reshaped. As the writings of Pesta- 
lozzi, Herbart, and Froebel were studied more closely, and with 
the new light on child development gained from child-study and 
the newer psychology, these new subjects came to be conceived of 

1 A few of the earlier adaptations of the idea may be given. In 1882 Montclair, 
New Jersey, introduced manual training into its elementary schools, and in 1885 
the State of New Jersey first offered state aid to induce the extension of the idea. 
In 1885 Philadelphia added cooking and sewing to its elementary schools, having 
done so in the girls' high school five years earlier. In 1888 the City of New York 
added drawing, sewing, cooking, and woodworking to its elementary-school course 
of study. 




Fig. 228. 
Redirected Manual Training 

A boy mending his shoe instead of making a 
mortice-joint 



■wmm 



772 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

in their proper light as means of individual expression, and to be 
extended to new forms, materials, colors, and new practical and 
artistic ends. To-day the instruction in manual work and the 
household arts in all their forms has been further changed to 
make of them educational instruments for interpreting the fields 
of art and industry and home-life in terms of their social signifi- 
cance and usefulness. Through these two new forms of educa- 
tion, also, the pupils in the elementary schools have been given 
training in expression and an insight into the practical work of 
life impossible in the old textbook type of elementary school. In 
the kindergarten, manual work, and the household arts, Froebel's 
principle of education through directed self-activity and self-ex- 
pression has borne abundant fruit. 

In the hands of French, English, and American educators the 
original manual-arts idea has been greatly expanded. In France 
some form of expression has been worked out for all grades of the 
primary school, and the work has been closely connected with art 
and industry on the one hand and with the home-life of the people 
on the other. In England the project system as applied to indus- 
try, and the household arts with reference to home-life, have been 
emphasized. In the United States the work has been individual- 
ized perhaps more than anywhere else, applied in many new di- 
rections — clay, leather, cement, metal — and used as a very 
important instrument for self-expression and the development of 
individual thinking. 

IV. THE ADDITION OF SCIENCE STUDY 

The gradual extension of the interest in science. A very prom- 
inent feature of world educational development, since about the 
middle of the nineteenth century, has been the general introduc- 
tion into the schools of the study of science. It is no exaggeration 
of the importance of this to say that no addition of new subject- 
matter and no change in the direction and purpose of education, 
since that time, has been of greater importance for the welfare of 
mankind, or more significant of new world conditions, than has 
been the emphasis recently placed, in all divisions of state school 
systems, on instruction in the principles and the applications of 
science. 

From the days of Francis Bacon (p. 390) on, the study of science 
has been making slow but steady progress. The early history of 
modern science we traced in chapter xvii. During the seven- 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 773 

teenth century English scholars were n^ost prominent in the fur- 
ther development, due largely to the greater tolerance of new ideas 
there, and the University of Cambridge early attained to some 
reputation (p. 423) as a place where instruction in the new scien- 
tific studies might be found. After the middle of the eighteenth 
century, in large part due to the illuminating work of Voltaire (p. 
485), a great interest in science arose among the French. In the 
Revolutionary days we accordingly find the French creating im- 
portant scientific institutions (p. 518), and Napoleon gave fre- 
quent evidence of his deep interest in scientific studies.^ This 
interest the French have since retained. 

From France this new interest in science passed quickly to the 
Germans. The new mathematical and physical studies had 
early found a home at the new University of Gottingen (p. 555), 
and largely under French influences scientific studies were later 
introduced into all the German universities. Early in the nine- 
teenth century the German universities took the lead as centers 
for the new scientific studies (p. 576) — a lead they retained 
throughout the century. In England the universities had, by 
the nineteenth century, lost much of their seventeenth-century 
prominence in science, and had settled down into teaching col- 
leges, instead of developing, as had the German universities, into 
institutions for scientific research. Compared with the reformed 
German universities, actuated by the new scientific spirit, the 
English universities of the mid-nineteenth century presented a 
very unfavorable ^ aspect (R. 359). In the United States, book 
instruction in the sciences came in near the close of the eighteenth 
century, but the first laboratory instruction in our colleges was 
not begun until 1846, and our real interest in science teaching 
dates from an even later period. Until the coming of German in- 
fluences, after the middle of the century, the American college ^ 
largely followed English models and practices. 

1 In 1802 Napoleon provided for instruction in natural history, astronomy, 
chemistry, physics, and mineralogy in the scientific course of the lycees, and in 1814 
enlarged this instruction. He also established numerous technical and military 
schools, with instruction based on mathematics and science. 

2 The Royal Commissioners which reported on the condition of the University of 
Oxford, in 1850, said: "It is generally acknowledged that both Oxford and the coun- 
try at large suffer greatly from the absence of a body of learned men devoting their 
lives to the cultivation of science, and to the direction of academical education. 
The fact that so few books of profound research emanate from the University of Ox- 
ford materially impairs its character as a seat of learning, and consequently its hold 
on the respect of the nation." 

^ Book instruction in the new sciences goes back, in the universities of most lands, 
to the late eighteenth century, but laboratory instruction is a much more recent 



774 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Yet, as we pointed out earlier, the early nineteenth century wit- 
nessed a vast expansion of scientific knowledge, and by i860 the 
main keys of modern science (p. 727) were in the hands of scholars 
everywhere. The great early development of scientific study had 
been carried on in a few universities or had been done by inde- 
pendent scholars, and had influenced but little instruction in the 
colleges or the schools below. 

Science instruction reaches the schools but slowly. The text- 
book organization of this new scientific knowledge, for teaching 
purposes, and its incorporation into the instruction of the schools, 
took place but slowly. 

I . The elementary schools. The greatest and the earliest success 
was made in German lands. There the pioneer work of Basedow 
(p. 534) and the Philanthropinists had awakened a widespread 
interest in scientific studies. In Switzerland, too, Pestalozzi 
had developed elementary science study and home geography, 
and, when Pestalozzian methods were introduced into the schools 
of Prussia, the study of elementary science (Realien) soon became 
a feature of the Volksschule instruction. From Prussia it spread 
to all German lands. In England the Pestalozzian idea was in- 
troduced into the Infant Schools,^ though in a very formal fash- 
ion, under the heading of object lessons. In this form elementary 
science study reached the United States, about i860, though 
a decade later well-organized courses in elementary science in- 
struction began to be introduced into the American elementary 
schools.^ 

After the political reaction following the Napoleonic wars had 
set in, on the continent of Europe, all thought-provoking studies 
were greatly curtailed in the people's schools. In England, foi 

development. Chemistry was the first science to develop, being the mother of sci- 
ence instruction, and probably the first chemical laboratory in the world to be 
opened to students was that of Liebig at Giessen, in 1826. The first American uni- 
versity to provide laboratory instruction in chemistry was Harvard, in 1846. The 
instruction in science in most of the universities, up to at least 1850, was book in- 
struction. (See schedule of studies for University of Michigan, R. 331.) The first 
American university to be founded on the German model was Johns Hopkins, in 
1876. 

1 By Charles Mayo and his sister, who opened a private Pestalozzian school, 
about 1825. Miss Mayo published her Lessons on Objects, explaining the method, 
and this became very popular in England after about 1830. Both the Mayos 
were prominent in the Infant-School movement, which adopted a formaUzed type, 
of Pestalozzian procedure. 

2 In 1871 Dr. William T. Harris, then Superintendent of City Schools in Saint 
Louis, published a well-organized course for the orderly study of the different 
sciences. This attracted wide attention, and was in time substituted for the 
scattered lessons on objects which had preceded it. This in turn has largely given 
way, in the lower grades, to nature study. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 775 

other reasons, object lessons did not make any marked headway, 
and as late as 1865 practically nothing relating to the great new 
world of scientific knowledge had as yet been introduced into the 
private and religious elementary schools (R. 360) which, up to 
that time, constituted England's chief dependence for the ele- 
mentary instruction of her people. 

2. The secondary schools. In the secondary schools the earliest 
work of importance in introducing the new scientific subjects was 
done by the Germans and the French. In German lands the 
Realschule obtained an early start (1747; p. 420), and the instruc- 
tion in mathematics and science it included ^ had begun to be 
adopted by the German secondary schools, especially in the 
South German States, before the period of reaction set in. Dur- 
ing the reign of Napoleon the scientific course in the French Ly- 
cees was given special prominence. After about 181 5, and con- 
tinuing until after 1848, practical and thought-provoking studies 
were under an official ban in both countries, and classical studies 
were specially favored.- Finally, in 1852 in France and in 1859 
in Prussia, responding to changed political conditions and new 
economic demands, both the scientific course in the Lycees and 
the Realschulen were given official recognition, and thereafter 
received increasing state favor and support. The scientific idea 
also took deep root in Denmark. There the secondary schools 
were modernized, in 1809, when the sciences were given an im- 
portant place, and again in 1850, when many of the Latin schools 
were transformed into Realskoler. 

In the United States the academies and the early high schools 
both had introduced quite an amount of mathematics and book- 
science,^ and, after about 1875, the development of laboratory in- 
struction in science in the growing high schools took place rather 
rapidly. Fellenberg's work in Switzerland (p. 546) had also 
awakened much interest in the United States, and by 1830 a 

^ At the time of Professor Bache's visit, in 1838, the instruction included Latin, 
French, English, German, history, religion, music, drawing, mathematics, natural 
history, physics, chemistry, and geography. 

2 Scientific instruction in the lycees was not in favor in France after 181 5, and 
in 1840 it was materially reduced, on the ground that it was injuring classical 
studies. 

* Astronomy, botany, chemistry, and natural philosophy had been prominent 
studies in the American academies. Between about 1825 and 1840 was the 
great period of their introduction. The first American high school (Boston, 1821) 
provided for instruction in geography, navigation and surveying, astronomy, and 
natural philosophy. By 1850 the rising high schools were incorporating scientific 
studies quite generally. The instruction was still textbook instruction, but some 
lecture-table demonstrations had begun to be common. 



776 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

number of Schools of Industry and Science had begun to appear.^ 
These made instruction in mathematics and science prominent 
features of their work. 

After the Napoleonic wars, England attained to the first place 
as an industrial and commercial nation. This led to a continual 
agitation on the part of manufacturers for some science and art 
instruction. In 1853, Parliament created a State Department of 
Science and Art (p. 638), and the promotion of science and art 
education by government grants was now begun. Though the 
nation had been the first to be transformed by the industrial 
revolution, and its foreign trade by 1850 reached all parts of the 
world, the secondary schools of England had remained largely un- 
touched by the change. They were still mainly the Renaissance 
Latin grammar schools they had been ever since Dean Colet 
(15 10) marked out the lines for such instruction by founding his 
reformed grammar school at St. Pauls (p. 275). Their courses of 
instruction contained little that was modern, and in their aims 
and purposes they went back to the days of the Revival of Learn- 
ing for their inspiration (R. 361). 

The challenge of Herbert Spencer. By the middle of the nine- 
teenth century the scientific and industrial revolutions had pro- 
duced important changes in the conditions of living in all the then 
important world nations. Particularly in the German States, 
France, England, and the United States had the effects of the 
revolutions in manufacturing and living been felt. In conse- 
quence there had been, for some time, a growing controversy be- 
tween the partisans of the older classical training and the newer 
scientific studies as to their relative worth and importance, both 
for intellectual discipline and as preparation for intelligent living, 
and by the middle of the nineteenth century this had become 
quite sharp. The "faculty psychology," upon which the theory 
of the discipline of the powers of the mind by the classics was 
largely based, was attacked, and the contention was advanced 
that the content of studies was of more importance in education 
than was method and drill. The advocates of the newer studies 
contended that a study of the classics no longer provided a suita- 
ble preparation for intelligent living, and the question of the rela- 
tive worth of the older and newer studies elicited more and more 
discussion as the century advanced. 

1 The Oneida School of Science and Industry, the Genesee Manual-Labor School, 
the Aurora Manual-Labor Seminary, and the Rensselaer School, all founded in the 
State of New York, between 1825 and 1830, were among the most important of 
ttiese earlv institutions. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 777 




229 



Herbert Spencer 



(1820-1903) 



In 1859 one of England's greatest scholars, Herbert Spencer, 
brought the whole question to a sharp issue by the publication of 
a remarkably incisive essay on "What Knowledge is of Most 
Worth? " In this he declared that the purpose of education was 
to "prepare us for complete living," and that the only way to 
judge of the value of an educational 
course was first to classify, in the 
order of their importance,^ the lead- 
ing activities and needs of life, and 
then measure the course of study 
by how fully it offers such a prepa- 
ration. Doing so (R. 362), and ap- 
plying such a test, he concluded that 
of all subjects a knowledge of science 
(R. 363) "was always most useful for 
preparation for life," and therefore 
the type of knowledge of most worth. 
In three other essays ^ he recom- 
mended a complete change from the 
classical type of training which had 
dominated English secondary education since the days of the 
Renaissance. Still more, instead of a few being educated by a 
"cultural discipline" for a life of learning and leisure, he urged 
general instruction in science, that all might receive training and 
help for the daily duties of life. 

These essays attracted wide attention, not only in England but 
in many other lands as well. They were a statement, in clear and 
forceful English, of the best ideas of the educational reformers for 
three centuries. In his statement of the principles upon which 
sound intellectual education should be based he merely enunci- 
ated theses for which educational reformers had stood since the 
days of Ratke and Comenius. In his treatment of moral and 

^ Spencer's classification of life activities and needs, in the order of their impor- 
tance, was (R. 362) : 

1. Those ministering directly to self-preservation. 

2. Those which secure for one the necessities of life, and hence minister indi- 

rectly to self-preservation. 

3. Those which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring. 

4. Those involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations. 

5. Those which fill up the leisure part of life, and are devoted to the gratification 

of tastes and feeHngs. 
" All were republished in book form, in 1 86 1, under the title of Education; Intel- 
lectual, Moral, and Physical. The volume contains four essays: What Knowledge 
is of Most Worth?; Intellectual Education; Moral Education; and Physical Educa- 
tion. The first essay served as an introduction to the other three. 



778 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



I wJ 



physical education he voiced the best ideas of John Locke. Spen- 
cer's great service was in giving forceful expression to ideas 
which, by i860, had become current, and in so doing he pushed to 
he front anew the question of educational values. The scientific 
and industrial revolutions had prepared the way for a redirection 
of national education, and the time was ripe in England, France, 
German lands, and the United States for such a discussion. As a 
result, though the questions he raised are still in part unsettled, a 
great change in assigned values has since been effected not only in 
these nations, but in most other nations and lands which have 
drawn the inspiration for their educational systems from them. 
Though his work was not specially original, we must nevertheless 
class Herbert Spencer as one of the great writers on educational 
aims and purposes, and his book as one of the great influences 
in reshaping educational practice. He gave a new emphasis 
to the work of all who had preceded him, and out of the discus- 
sion which ensued came a new and a greatly enlarged estimate 
as to the importance of science study in all divisions of the 
school. 

The new educational purpose. It is perhaps not too much to 
say that out of Spencer's gathering-up and forceful statement of 

the best ideas of his time, and the 
discussion which followed, a new 
conception of the educational pur- 
pose as adjustment to the life one is 
to live — physical, economic, social, 
moral, political — was clearly formu- 
lated, and a new definition of a lib- 
eral education was framed. The 
former found expression in a rather 
rapid introduction of science-study 
into the elementary school, the sec- 
ondary school, and the college, after 
about 1865, in the school systems 
of all progressive nations, and the 
subsequent extension of the scientific 
method to such new fields as history, politics, government, and 
social welfare. The latter — the new definition of a liberal edu- 
cation — was wonderfully well stated in an address (1868) by the 
"English scientist, Thomas Huxley, when he said: ^ 

' "A Liberal Education," in his Science and Education, d. 86. 




Fig. 230. Thomas H. Huxley 
(1825-95) 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 779 

That man, I think, has had a Hberal education who has been so 
trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does 
with ease and pleasure all the work that, as ^ mechanism, it is capable 
of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal 
strength, and in smooth working order; ready, hke a steam engine, to 
be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge 
the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the 
great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her opera- 
tions; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose pas- 
sions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a 
tender conscience ; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Na- 
ture or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. 

Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; 
for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He 
will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together 
rarely: she as his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her 
conscious self, her minister and interpreter. 

The inter-relation between the movement for the study of the 
sciences and the other movements for the improvement of in- 
struction which we have so far described in this chapter, was 
close. Pestalozzi had emphasized instruction in geography and 
the study of nature; Froebel had given a prominent place to na- 
ture study and school gardening; the manual-arts work tended to 
exhibit industrial processes and relationships; and the scientific 
emphasis on content rather than drill was in harmony with the 
theories of all the modern reformers. Still more, the scientific 
movement was in close harmony with the new individualistic 
tendency of the early part of the nineteenth century, and with the 
movements for the improvement of individual and national wel- 
fare which have been so prominent a characteristic of the latter 
half of the century. 

V. SOCIAL MEANING OF THESE CHANGES 

A century of progress. Pestalozzi, true to the individualistic 
spirit of the age in which he lived and worked, had seen education 
as an individual development, and the ends of education as in- 
dividual ends. The spirit of the French Revolutionary period 
was the spirit of individualism. With the progress of the Indus- 
trial Revolution and the consequent rise of new social problems, 
the emphasis was gradually shifted from the individual to society 
— from the single man to the man in the mass. The first educa- 
tional thinker of importance to see and clearly state this new con- 
ception in terms of the school was Herbart. Seeing the educa- 



78o HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tional purpose in far clearer perspective than had those who had 
gone before him, he showed that education must have for its 
function the preparation of man to Kve in organized society, and 
that character and social morality, rather than individual devel- 
opment, must in consequence be the larger aims. ' Froebel, pos- 
sessed of something of the same insight, and seeing clearly the 
educational importance of activity and expression, had opened up 
for children a wealth of new contacts with the world about them 
in the new type of educational institution which he created. His 
principles, he said, when thoroughly worked out and applied to 
education "would revolutionize the world." He did not com- 
plete the full educational organization he had planned, but in the 
hands of the Swedes and Finns similar ideas were worked out in 
practical form and made a part of school work. Applying Froe- 
bel's idea to instruction in the old trades and industries, declining 
in importance in the face of the rise of the factory system, they 
evolved the manual- training activities, and these have since been 
made important tools for giving to young people some intelligent 
ideas as to the industrial relationships and economic problems of 
our complex modern life. 

Since this early pioneer work changes in school work have been 
numerous and of far-reaching importance. The methods and 
purpose of instruction in the older subjects have been revised; 
new studies, which would serve to interpret to the young the in- 
dustrial and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, have 
been introduced; the expression-subjects — the domestic arts, 
music, drawing, clay-modeling, color work, the manual arts, na- 
ture study, gardening — have given a new direction to school 
work; and the study of science and the vopa^io^^ ^^^ attained to a 
place of importance previously unknown. \ During the past half- 
century the school has been transformed, m the principal world 
nations, from a disciplinary institution where drill in mastering 
the rudiments of knowledge was given, into an instrument of de- 
mocracy calculated to train young people for living, for useful 
service in the oflfice and shop and home, and to prepare them for 
intelligent participation in the increasingly complex social and 
political and industrial life of a modern world. This transforma- 
tion of the school has not always been easy (R. 365), but the 
vastly changed conditions of modern life have demanded such a 
transformation in all progressive nations. 

The contribution of John Dewey. The foremost American in-. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 781 

terpreter, in terms of the school, of the vast social and industrial 
changes which have marked the nineteenth century, is John 
Dewey^ (1859- ). Better perhaps than anyone else he has 
thought out and stated a new educational philosophy, suited to 
the changed and changing conditions of human living. His work, 
both experimental and theoretical, has tended both to re-psy- 
chologize (R. 364) and socialize education; to give to it a practical 




Fig. 231. a Reorganized Kindergarten 

Drawn from a photograph showing the reconstpuction of the kindergarten activities, 
as worked out by Dewey at Chicago. 



content, along scientific and industrial lines; and to interpret to 
the child the new social and industrial conditions of modern soci- 
ety by connecting the activities of the school closely with those of 
real life. 

Starting with the premises that ''the school cannot be a prepa- 
ration for social life except as it reproduces the typical conditions 
of social life "; that "industrial activities are the most influential 
factors in determining the thought, the ideals, and the social or- 
ganization of a people " ; and that " the school should be life, not a 

^ For many years head of the School of Education at the University of Chicago, 
but more recently Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York City. 



782 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

preparation for living"; Dewey for a time conducted an experi- 
mental school, for children from four to thirteen years of age, to 
give concrete expression to his educational ideas. These, first 
consciously set forth by Froebel, were: ^ 

1. That the primary business of the school is to train in cooperative 
and mutually helpful living. . . . 

2. That the primary root of all educational activity is in the in- 
stinctive, impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not 
in the presentation and application of external material, 

3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and 
directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the cooper- 
ative living . . . taking advantage of them to reproduce, on the 
child's plane, the tyi:>ical doings and occupations of the larger, 
maturer society into which he is finally to go forth; and that it is 
through production and creative use that valuable knowledge is 
clinched. 

The work of this school ^ was of fundamental importance in di- 
recting the reorganization of the work of the kindergarten along 
different and larger lines, and also has been of significance in re- 
directing the instruction in both the social subjects — history 
(R. 366), hterature, etc. — and the manual, domestic, and artis- 
tic activities of the school. In bis subsequent writings he may be 
said to have stated an important new philosophy for the school in 
terms of modern social, political, and industrial needs. 

The Dewey educational philosophy. Believing that the public 
school is the chief remedy for the ills of organized society. Pro- 
fessor Dewey has tried to show how to change the work of the 
school so as to make it a miniature of society itself. Social defi- 
ciency, and not mere knowledge, he has conceived to be the end, 
and this social efficiency is to be produced through participation 
in the activities of an institution of society, the school. The dif- 
ferent parts of the school system thus become a unified institu- 
tion, in which children are taught how to live amid the con- 
stantly increasing complexities of modern social and industrial 
life. 

Education, therefore, in Dewey's conception, involves not 
merely learning, but play, construction, use of tools, contact with 
nature, expression, and activity; and the school should be a place 
where children are working rather than listening, learning life by 
living life, and becoming acquainted with social institutions and 

^ Dewey, John, in Elementary School Record, p. 142. 

^ Described in The Elementary School Record, a series of nine monographs, making 
a volume of 241 pages. University of Chicago Press, 1900. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 783 

industrial processes by studying them. The work of the school 
is in large part to reduce the complexity of modern life to such 
terms as children can understand, and to introduce the child to 
modern life through simplified experiences. Its primary business 
may be said to be to train children in cooperative and mutually 
Xhelpful living. The virtues of a school, as Dewey points out, are 
learning by doing; the use of muscles, sight and feeling, as well as 
hearing; and the employment of energy, originality, and initia- 
tive. The virtues of the school in the past were the colorless, 
negative virtues of obedience, docility, and submission. Mere 
obedience and the careful performance of imposed tasks he holds 
to be not only a poor preparation for social and industrial effi- 
ciency, but a poor preparation for democratic society and govern- 
ment as well. Responsibility for good go^^ernment, under any 
democratic form of organization, rests with all, and the school 
should prepare for the political life of to-morrow by training its 
pupils to meet responsibilities, developing initiative, awakening 
social insight, and causing each to shoulder a fair share of the 
work of government in the school. 

We have now before us the great contributions to a philosophy 
for the educational process made since the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century. Many other workers in different lands, but 
more particularly in German lands, France, Italy, England, and 
the United States, have added their labors to the expansion and re- 
direction of the school. They are too numerous to mention and, 
though often nationally important, need not be included here. 
Still more, the contributions of Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel, 
Spencer, Dewey, and their followers and disciples are so inter- 
woven in the educational theory and practice of to-day that it is 
in most cases impossible to separate them from one another. ^ 

^ A very good example of this is to be found in the work of Colonel Francis W. 
Parker (1837-1902) in the United States. It was he who introduced Germanized 
Pestalozzian-Ritter methods of teaching geography; he who strongly advocated the 
Herbartian plan for concentration of instruction about a central core, which he 
worked out for geography; he who insisted so strongly on the Froebelian principle of 
self-expression as the best way to develop the thinking process; he who advocated 
science instruction in the schools; and he who saw educational problems so clearlj 
from the standpoint of the child that he, and the pupils he trained, did much to 
bring about the reorganization in elementary education which was worked out in the 
United States between about 1875 and 1900. 



784 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. How do you explain the long-continued objection to teacher-training? 

2. Contrast "oral and objective teaching" with the former "individual in- 
struction." 

3. Show how complete a change in classroom procedure this involved. 

4. Show how Pestalozzian ideas necessitated a " technique of instruction." 

5. Why is it that Pestalozzian ideas as to language and arithmetic instruc- 
tion have so slowly influenced the teaching of grammar, language, and 
arithmetic? 

6. How do you explain the decline in importance of the once-popular mental 
arithmetic? 

J. Show how child study was a natural development from the Pestalozzian 
psychology and methodology. 

8. Explain what is meant by the statements that Herbart rejected: 

(a) The conventional-social ideal of Locke. 

(b) The unsocial ideal of Rousseau. 

(c) The "faculty-psychology" conception of Pestalozzi. 

9. Explain what is meant by saying that Herbart conceived of education as 
broadly social, rather than personal. 

10. Show in what ways and to what extent Herbart: 

(a) Enlarged our conception of the educational process. 

(b) Improved the instruction content and process. 

11. Explain why Herbartian ideas took so much more quickly in the United 
States than did Pestalozzianism. 

12. State the essentials of the kindergarten idea, and the psychology behind 
it. 

13. State the contribution of the kindergarten idea to education. 

14. Show the connection between the sense impression ideas of Pestalozzi, 
the self-activity of Froebel, and the manual activities of the modern ele- 
mentary school. 

15. Explain why scientific studies came into the schools so slowly, up to 
about i860, and so very rapidly after about that time. 

16. Explain the particularly long resistance to the introduction of scientific 
studies by industrial England. 

17. State the comparative importance of content and drill in education. 

18. Does the reasoning of Herbert Spencer appeal to you as sound? If not, 
why not? 

19. Show how the argument of Spencer for the study of science was also an 
argument for a more general diffusion of educational advantages. 

20. Would schools have advanced in importance as they have done had the 
industrial revolution not taken place? Why? 

21. Why is more extended education called for as "industrial life becomes 
more diversified, its parts narrower, and its processes more concealed"? 

22. Point out the social significance of the educational work of John Dewey. 

23. Point out the value, in the new order of society, of each group of school 
subjects listed in footnote i on page 763. 

24. Contrast the virtues of a school before Pestalozzi's time and those of a 
modern school. 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections illustrative 
of the contents of this chapter are reproduced: 
344. Bache; The German Seminaries for Teachers. 



NEW CONCEPTIONS OF EDUCATION 785 

345. Bache: A German Teachers' Seminary Described. 

346. Bache: A French Normal School Described. 

347. Barnard: Beginnings of Teacher-Training in England. 

348. Barnard: The Pupil-Teacher System Described. 

349. Clinton: Recommendation for Teacher-Training Schools. 

350. Massachusetts: Organizing the First Normal Schools. 

(a) The Organizing Law. 

(b) Admission and Instruction in. 

(c) Mann: Importance of the Normal School. 

351. Early Textbooks: Examples of Instruction from 

(a) Davenport: History of the United States. 

(b) Morse: Elements of Geography — Map. 

(c) Morse Elements of Geography. 

352. Murray: A Typical Teacher's Contract. 

353. Bache: The Elementary Schools of Berlin in 1838. 

354. Providence: Grading the Schools of. 

355. Felkin: Herbart's Educational Ideas. 

356. Felkin: Herbart's Educational Ideas Applied. 

357. Titchener: Herbart and Modern Psychology. 

358. Marenholtz-Biilow: Froebel's Educational Views. 

359. Huxley: EngHsh and German Universities Contrasted. 

360. Huxley: Mid-nineteenth-Century Elementary Education in Eng- 
land. 

361. Huxley: Mid-nineteenth-Century Secondary Education in England. 

362. Spencer: What Knowledge is of Most Worth? 

363. Spencer: Conclusions as to the Importance of Science. 

364. Dewey: The Old and New Psychology Contrasted. 

365. Ping: Difficulties in Transforming the School. 

(a) Relating Education to Life. 

(b) The Old Teacher and the New System. 

366. Dewey: Socialization of School Work illustrated by History. 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Contrast the instruction in a German Teachers' Seminary (345) or a 
French normal school (346) of 1838, as described by Bache, with that of 
an American normal school of to-day. 

2. What do the beginnings of teacher-training in England (347, 348) indi- 
cate as to conceptions then existing as to the educational process? 

3. Show, by comparison, that the beginnings of the American normal school 
were German, rather than English in origin. 

4. Just what educational conditions does Governor Clinton (349) indicate 
as existing in New York State, in 1827? 

5. Contrast the instruction in the early Massachusetts normal schools (350) 
with that in the German (345) and French (346) of about the same 
time. 

6. What do the three professional courses reproduced (345, 346, 350 b) in- 
dicate as to the development of pedagogical work by about 1840? 

7. Compare the textbook types, given in 351, with modern textbooks in 
equivalent subjects. 

8. Just what light on school teaching, in 1841, does the teacher's contract 
given (352) throw? 

9. State the steps in the evolution of a graded system, of schools (353, 354). 
10. State the essentials of Herbart's educational ideas (355, 356), and the 

nature of the advances made over his predecessors. 



786 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

11. State the essentials of Froebel's educational ideas, as explained by the 
Baroness von Marenholtz-Biilow (358). 

12. Explain the difference between the universities of the two nations (359). 

13. Contrast elementary education in England (360) with that in the 
United States at the same period. 

14. Would you add anything else to Spencer's requirements to prepare for 
complete living? What? Why? 

15. How do you explain science being "written against in our theologies and 
frowned upon from our pulpits" (363) when it is of such importance as 
Spencer concludes? 

16. Contrast the old and the new psychology (357, 364). 

17. Have the difficulties experienced in the transformation of instruction in 
China (365) been essentially different than with us? How? 

18. Apply Dewey's idea as to the socialization of history (366) to instruc- 
tion in geography. 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

Barnard, Henry. National Education in Europe. 
*Bowen, H. C. Froebel and Education through Self-Activity. 

Compayre, G. Herbart and Education by Instruction. 
*De Garmo, Chas. Herbart and the Herbartians. 

Dewey, John. The School and Social Progress. (Nine numbers.) 
*Dewey, John. The School and Society. 
Gordy, J. P. Rise and Growth of the Normal School Idea in the United 
States. Circular of Information, United States Bureau of Education, 
No. 8, 1891. 
Hollis, A. P. The Oswego Movement. 
*Jordan, D. S. " Spencer's Essay on Education"; in Cosmopolitan Maga- 
zine, vol. XXIX, pp. 135-49. (Sept. 1902.) 
Judd, C. H. The Training of Teachers in England, Scotland, and Ger- 
many. (Bulletin 35, 1914, United States Bureau of Education.) 
Monroe, Will S. History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United 
States. 
*Parker, S. C. History of Modern Elementary Education. 
Ping Wen Kuo. The Chinese System of Public Education. 
Spencer, Herbert. Education; Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. 
Vanderwalker, N. C. The Kindergarten in American Education. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 

I. POLITICAL 

The enlarged conception of public education. The new ideas as 
to the purpose and functions of the State promulgated by Eng- 
lish and French eighteenth-century thinkers, and given concrete 
expression in the American and French revolutions near the close 
of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning to the 
school and a new purpose to the education of a people. In the 
theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the empirical 
work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular 
school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that di- 
rection, first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early 
organized to serve national ends. The new American States, 
also long moving toward state organization and control, early 
created state schools to replace the earlier religious schools; while 
the French Revolution enthusiasts abolished the religious school 
and ordered the substitution of a general system of state schools 
to serve their national ends. 

From these beginnings, as we have seen, the state-school idea 
has in course of time spread to all continents, and nations every- 
where to-day have come to feel that the maintenance of a more or 
less comprehensive system of state schools is so closely connected 
with national welfare and progress as to be a necessity for the 
State (R. 367). In consequence, state ministries for education 
have been created in all the important world nations; state and 
local school officials have been provided generally to see that the 
state purpose in creating schools is carried out; state normal 
schools for the preparation of teachers have been established; 
comprehensive state school codes have been enacted or educa- 
tional decrees formulated; and constantly increasing expendi- 
tures for education are to-day derived by taxing the wealth of the 
State to educate the children of the State. 

Change from the original purpose. The original purpose in the 
establishment of schools by the State was everywhere to pro- 
mote literacy and citizenship. Under all democratic forms of 
government it was also to insure to the people the elements of 



788 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

learning that they might be prepared for participation in the 
functions of government.^ This is well expressed in the quota- 
tions given (p. 525) from early American statesmen as to the need 
for the education of public opinion and the diffusion of knowledge 
among the people. The same ideas were expressed by French 
writers and statesmen of the time, and by the English after the 
passage of the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 (p. 642). With the 
gradual extension of the franchise to larger and larger numbers of 
the people, the extension of educational advantages naturally had 
to follow. The education of new citizens for " their political and 
civil duties as members of society and freemen "' became a neces- 
sity, and closely followed each extension of the right to vote. In 
all democratic governments the growing complexity of modern 
political society has since greatly enlarged these early duties of 
the school. To-day, in modern nations where general manhood 
suffrage has come to be the rule, and still more so in nations 
which have added female suffrage as well, the continually in- 
creasing complexity of the political, economic, and social prob- 
lems upon which the voters are expected to pass judgment is such 
that a more prolonged period of citizenship education is necessary 
if voters are to exercise, in any intelligent manner, their functions 
of citizenship. In nations where the initiative, referendum, and 
recall have been added, the need for special education along po- 
litical, economic, and social lines has been still further empha- 
sized. 

At first instruction in the common-school branches, with in- 
struction in morals or religion added, was regarded as sufficient. 
In States, such as the German, where religious instruction was re- 
tained in the schools, this has been made a powerful instrument 
in moulding the citizenship and upholding the established order. 
The history of the different nations has also been used by each as 
a means for instilling desired conceptions of citizenship, and some 
work in more or less formal civil government has usually been 
added. To-day all these means have been proven inadequate for 
democratic peoples. In consequence, the work in civil govern- 
ment is being changed and broadened into institutional and com- 
munity civics; the work of the elementary school is being social- 
ized, along the lines advocated by Dewey; and instruction in 
economic principles and in the functions of government is being 

1 For long the knowledge-conception dominated instruction, it being firmly 
believed by the advocates of schools that knowledge and virtue were somewhat 
synonymous termi. 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 789 

introduced into the secondary schools. Instead of being made 
mere teaching institutions, engaged in promoting literacy and 
diffusing the rudiments of learning among the electorate, schools 
are to-day being called upon to grasp the significance of their 
political and social relationships, and to transform themselves 
into institutions for improving and advancing the welfare of the 
State (R. 368). 

The promotion of nationality. In Prussia the promotion of na- 
tional solidarity was early made an important aim of the school. 
This has in time become a common national purpose, as there has 
dawned upon statesmen generally the idea that a national spirit 
or culture is "an artificial product which transcends social, reli- 
gious, and economic distinctions," and that it "could be manu- 
factured by education" (R. 340). In consequence of this dis- 
covery the school has been raised to a new position of importance 
in the national life, and has become the chief means for develop- 
ing in the citizenship that national unity and national strength so 
desirable under present-day world conditions. In the German 
States, where this function of the school has in recent times been 
perverted to carry forward mperialistic national ends (R. 342) ; in 
France, where it has been intelligently used to promote a rational 
type of national strength (R. 341); in Italy, where divergent ra- 
cial types are being fused into a new national unity; in Cuba, 
Porto Rico, and the Philippines (R. 343) where the United States 
has used education to bring backward peoples up to a new level of 
culture, and to develop in them firm foundations of national 
solidarity; in China (R. 335) where an ancient people, speaking 
numerous dialects, is making the difficult transition from an old 
culture to the newer western civilization ; and in Algiers and Mo- 
rocco, where the spirit of French nationality is being fused into 
dark-skinned tribesmen — everywhere to-day, where public edu- 
cation has really taken hold on the national life, we find the school 
being used for the promotion of national solidarity and the incul- 
cation of national ideals and national culture. To such an extent 
has this become true that practically all the pressing problems of 
the school to-day, in any land, find their ultimate explanation in 
terms of the new nineteenth-century conceptions of political na- 
tionality. 

Since the development of world trade routes following long rail 
and steamship lines, along which people as well as raw materials 
and manufactured articles pass to and fro, the entrance of new and 



790 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

diverse peoples into distant national groups has created a new 
problem of nationalization that before the early nineteenth cen- 
tury was largely unknown. Previous to the nineteenth century 
the problem was confined almost entirely to peoples conquered 
and annexed by the fortunes of war. To-day it is a voluntary 
migration of peoples, and a migration of such proportions and 
from such distant and unlike civilizations that the problem of as- 
similating the foreigner has become, particularly in the English- 
speaking nations and colonies, to which distant and unrelated 
peoples have turned in largest numbers,^ a serious national prob- 
lem. The migration of 32,102,671 persons to the United States, 
between 1820 and 19 14, from all parts of the world, has been a 
movement of peoples compared with which the migrations of the 
Germanic tribes — Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Goths, Visigoths, Van- 
dals, Suevi, Danes, Burgundians, Huns — into the old Roman 
Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries pale into insignificance. 
No such great movement of peoples was ever known before in his- 
tory, and the assimilative power of the American nation has not 
been equal to the task. The World War revealed the extent of 
the failure to nationalize the foreigner who has been permitted 
to come, and brought the question of "Americanization" to the 
front as one of the most pressing problems connected with Ameri- 
can national education. With the world in flux racially as it now 
is, the problem of the assimilation of non-native peoples is one 
which the schools of every nation which offers political and eco- 
nomic opportunity to other peoples must face. This has called 
for the organization of special classes in the schools, evening and 
adult instruction, community-center work, nationalization pro- 
grams, compulsory attendance of children, state oversight of 
private and religious schools, and other forms of educational un- 
dertakings undreamed of in the days when the State first took 
over the schools from the Church the better to promote literacy 
and citizenship. 

Effects of the Industrial Revolution. The effects of the great 
industrial and social changes which we have previously described 
are written large across the work of the school. As the civiliza- 
tion in the leading world nations has increased in complexity, and 

1 It is to democratic England and the United States, and to the EngHsh self- 
governing dominions, that the greatest flood of emigrants from less advanced civili- 
zations have gone. South America has also experienced a large recent immigration, 
but this has been mainly of peoples from the Latin races, and hence easier of assimi- 
lation. 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 791 

the ramifications of the social and industrial life have widened, 
the school has been called upon to broaden its work, and develop 
new types of instruction to increase its effectiveness. An educa- 
tion which was entirely satisfactory for the simpler form of social 
and industrial life of two generations ago has been seen to be ut- 
terly inadequate for the needs of the present and the future. It 
is the far-reaching change in social and industrial and home-life, 
brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which underlies most 
of the pressing problems in educational readjustment to-day. As 
the industrial life of nations has become more diversified, its 
parts narrower, and its processes more concealed, new and more 
extended training has been called for to prepare young people for 
the work of life ; to reveal to them something of the intricacy and 
interdependence of modern political and industrial and social 
groups; and to point out to them the importance of each one's 
part in the national political and industrial organization. With 
the ever-increasing subdivision and specialization of labor, the 
danger from class subdivision has constantly increased, and more 
and more the school has been called upon to instill into all a po- 
litical and social consciousness that will lead to unity amid in- 
creasing diversity, and to concerted action for the preservation 
and improvement of the national life. 

More education than formerly has also been demanded to en- 
able future citizens to meet intelligently national and personal 
problems, and with the widening of the suffrage and the spread of 
democratic ideas there has come a necessary widening of the edu- 
cational ladder, so that more of the masses of the people may 
climb. Even in nations having the continental-European two- 
class school system, larger educational opportunities for the 
masses have had to be provided. This has come through the pro- 
vision of middle schools, continuation schools, higher primary 
schools, and people's high schools,^ as in Germany, France (see 
diagram, p. 598), the Scandinavian countries (p. 713; R. 37o), 
and Japan (p. 720). In nations having an American- type educa- 
tional ladder, it has led to the multiplication of secondary schools 
and secondary-school courses, that a larger and larger percentage 
of the people may be prepared better to meet the increasingly 
complex and increasingly difficult conditions of modern political, 
social, and industrial life. In the more advanced and more dem- 

^ See a good article on this development by I. L. Kandel, in the Educational Re- 
view for November, 1919, entitled "The Junior High School in European Sys- 
tems." 



792 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

ocratic nations we also note the establishment of systems of eve- 
ning schools, adult instruction, university extension, science and 
art instruction in special centers, the multiplication of libraries, 
and the increasing use of the lecture, the stereopticon, and the 
public press, for the purpose of keeping the people informed. No 
nation has done more to extend the advantages of secondary edu- 
cation to its people than has the United States; France has been 
especially prominent in adult instruction ; England has done note- 
worthy work with university extension and science and art instruc- 
tion; while the United States has carried the library movement 
farther than any other land. All these, again, are extensions of 
educational opportunity to the masses of the people in a manner 
undreamed of a century ago. 

University expansion. The modern university first attained its 
development in Prussia (pp. 553-55), while in England and in the 
nations which drew their inspiration from her, the teaching college, 
with its narrow range of studies and disciplinary instruction (R. 
331) , continued to dominate higher education until past the middle 
of the nineteenth century (R. 359) . The old universities of France, 
aside from Paris, were virtually destroyed in the days of the Rev- 
olution, and their re-creation as effective teaching and research 
institutions has been a relatively recent (1896) event. The uni- 
versities of Italy and Spain ceased to be effective teaching in- 
stitutions centuries ago, and only recently have begun to give 
evidences of new life. 

Within the past three quarters of a century, and in many na- 
tions within a much shorter period of time, the university has 
very generally experienced a new manifestation of popular favor, 
and is to-day looked upon as perhaps the most important part, 
viewed from the standpoint of the future welfare of the State, of 
the entire system of public instruction maintained by the State. 
In it the leaders for the State are trained; in it the thinking which 
is to dominate government a quarter-century later is largely done; 
out of it come the creative geniuses whose work, in dozens of 
fields of human endeavor, will mould the political, social, and sci- 
entific future of the nation (R. 369). Every government depend- 
ing upon a two-class school system must of necessity draw its 
leaders in the professions, in government, in pure and applied sci- 
ence, and in many other lines from the small but carefully se- 
lected classes its universities train. In a democracy, depending 
entirely upon drawing its future leaders from among the mass, 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 793 

the university becomes an indispensable institution for the train- 
ing of leaders and for the promotion of the national welfare. In a 
democratic government one of the highest functions of a univer- 
sity is to educate leaders and to create the standards for democ- 
racy. 

The university has, accordingly, in all lands, recently experi- 
enced a great expansion. The German universities have been 
prominent modern institutions for a century and a half. Realiz- 
ing, as no other people have done, their value in developing skilled 
leaders for the State, promoting the national welfare, integrating 
the Empire, and as centers for building up among students of 
other nationalities a good-will toward Germany, large sums have 
been spent on their further development since 187 1. Within the 
past quarter-century new and strong French universities have 
been created,^ and old universities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and 
Greece have been awakened to a new life. The English universi- 
ties have been made over, since 1870, and new municipal univer- 
sities in Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Liv- 
erpool, and London have set new standards in English higher edu- 
cation. The universities of Scotland, Holland, Switzerland, and 
the Scandinavian countries have also recently attained to world 
prominence. In Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, the 
Philippines, India, Egypt, Palestine, Algiers, and South Africa, 
new universities have been created to advance the national wel- 
fare. The South American nations have also established a num- 
ber of promising new foundations, and given new life to older 
ones. Often nations swinging out into the current of western 
civilization have developed their universities before popular edu- 
cation really got under way. 

In no country has the development of university instruction 
been more rapid than in the United States and Canada. New 
and important state universities are to-day found in most of the 
American States and Canadian Provinces, some States maintain- 
ing two. These have been relatively recent creations to serve 
democracy's needs, and upon the support of these state universi- 
ties large and increasing sums of money are spent annually.- In 

' Paris, for example, has become the greatest university in Europe, exceeding 
Berlin (19 14) in students by approximately 25 per cent and in expenditures 40 per 
cent. 

* "The rise of these great universities is the most epoch-making feature of our 
American civilization, and they are to become more and more the leaders and the 
makers of our civilization. They are of the people. When a state university has 
gained solid ground, it means that the people of a whole state have turned their 



794 nioivjr\.i kjv i^j_^u\^/\i iwxn 

no nation of the world, too, has private benevolence created and 
endowed so many private universities of high rank as in the 
United States,^ and these have fallen into their proper places as 
auxiliary agents for the promotion of the national welfare in gov- 
ernment, science, art, and the learned professions. 

From small collegiate institutions with a very limited curricu- 
lum, a century ago, stimulated in part by the German example 
and in part responding to new national needs, universities to-day, 
in all the leading world nations, have developed into groups of 
well-organized professional schools, ministering to the great num- 
ber of special needs of modern life and government. The univer- 
sity development since the middle of the nineteenth century has 
been greater than at any period before in world history, and with 
the spread of democracy, dependent as democracy is upon mass 
education to obtain its leaders, the university has become *'the 
soul of the State" (R. 369). The university development of the 
next half-century, the world as a whole considered, may possibly 
surpass anything that we have recently witnessed. 

The state school systems as organized. We now find state 
school systems organized in all the leading world nations. In 
many the system of public instruction maintained is broad and 
extensive, beginning often with infant schools or kindergartens, 
continuing up through elementary schools, middle schools, con- 
tinuation schools, secondary schools, and normal schools, and cul- 
minating in one or more state universities. In addition there are 
to-day, in many nations, state systems of scientific and technical 
schools and institutions, and vocational schools and schools for 
special classes, to which we shall refer more in detail a little fur- 
ther on. The support of all these systems of public instruction 
to-day comes largely from the direct or indirect taxation of the 
wealth of the State. Being now conceived of as essential to the 
welfare and progress of the State, the State yearly confiscates a 
portion of every man's property and uses it to maintain a service 
deem.ed vital to its purposes. 

The sums spent to-day on education by modern States seem 

faces toward the light; it means that the whole system of state schools has been 
welded into an effective agent for civilization. Those who direct the purposes of 
these great enterprises of democracy cannot be too often reminded that the highest 
function of a university is to furnish standards for a democracy." (Pritchett, 
Henry S., in Atlantic Monthly.) 

^ The gifts and bequests for colleges and universities in the United States, from 
1871 to 1916, totaled $647,536,608, and by 1920 probably have reached $750,000- 
000. 



enormous, compared with the sums spent for education under 
conditions existing a century ago. In England, for example, 
where the first national aid was granted, in 1833, in the form of a 
parliamentary grant of £20,000 (approximately $100,000), the 
parliamentary grants for elementary schools had reached approxi- 
mately £12,000,000 by 1910, with an additional national aid for 
universities of over £1,100,000. By 1920 the grants were £32,- 
851,111, and by 1931, Scotland included, were £56,717,000. In 
France a treasury grant of 50,000 francs (approximately $10,000) 
was first made for primary schools, in 18 16. This was doubled in 
1829, and in 1831 was raised to a million francs. By 1850, the state 
aid for primary education had reached 3,000,000 francs; by 1870, 
10,000,000 francs; by 1880, 30,000,000; by 1914, 220,000,000; and 
by 1930, approximately 600,000,000 francs (old value). In addi- 
tion the State made grants for secondary schools and universities. 
In the United States the total expenditures for maintenance only 
of public elementary and secondary schools was $69,107,612, in 
1870-71; had reached $214,964,618 by the end of the nineteenth 
century; and was $640,717,053 in 1915-16, with an additional 
$101,752,542 for universities. By 1920 the total expenditures 
for the maintenance of public elementary, secondary, and higher 
education in the United States was $1,036,151,209, and by 1930 
approximately $3,200,000,000. These rapidly increasing ex- 
penditures merely record the changing political conception as to 
the national importance of enlarging the educational opportuni- 
ties and advantages of those who are to constitute and direct the 
future State. 

II. SCIENTIFIC 

In no phase of the remarkable educational development made 
by nations, since the middle of the nineteenth century, has there 
been a more important expansion of the educational service than 
in the creation of schools dealing with the applications of science 
to the affairs of the national life. Still more, no extension of in- 
struction into new fields has ever yielded material benefits, in- 
creased productivity, alleviated suffering, or multiplied comforts 
and conveniences as has this new development in applied scientific 
education during the past three quarters of a century. 

Science instruction in the schools. At first this new work 
came in, as we have seen (p. 774), but slowly, and its introduction 
into the secondary schools of France, Germany, England, the 
United States, and other nations for a time met with bitter opposi- 



796 HlblUKY Ut l^UUL^Al lUiN 

tion from the partisans of the older type of intellectual trainims. 
In Germany it was not until after Emperor William II came tc> 
the throne (1888) that the Realschulen really found a warm parti- 
san, he demanding (1890), in the name of the national welfare, 
that the secondary schools ''depart entirely from the basis that 
has existed for centuries — the old monastic education of the 
Middle Ages" — and that "young Germans and not young 
Greeks and Romans " be trained in the schools (R. 368). During 
his reign the Realschulen (six-year course) and Oberrealschulen 
(nine-year course) were especially favored, while permission to 
found additional Gymnasien became hard to obtain. The scien- 
tific course in the French Lycees similarly did not prosper until 
after the coming of the Third Republic (187 1) and the rise of 
modern scientific and industrial demands. In England it was not 
until after 1870 that the endowed secondary schools began to in- 
clude science instruction, and laboratory instruction in the sci- 
ences began to be introduced into the secondary schools of the 
United States at about the same time. In the United States, too, 
the first manual- training high school was not established until 
1880, but by 1890 the creation of such schools was clearly under 
way. Other nations — Switzerland, Holland, the Scandinavian 
countries — also began to include laboratory science instruction 
in the work of their secondary schools at about the same time. 
The decade of the seventies witnessed a rising interest in instruc- 
tion in science which carried such work into the secondary schools 
of all progressive nations. To-day, in nearly all lands, we find 
secondary-school courses in science, or special secondary schools 
for scientific instruction, occupying a position of at least equal 
importance with the older classical courses or schools. As science 
instruction has become organized, and a knowledge of the princi- 
ples of science has become diffused, object lessons, Realien, nature 
study, or elementary science instruction has very generally been 
put into the elementary or people's schools for the younger pu- 
pils. As a result, young people finishing the elementary schools 
to-day know more relating to the laws of the universe, and the 
applications of these laws to human life and industry, than did 
distinguished scholars two centuries ago. 

All this work in the elementary schools, middle schools, people's 
high schools, secondary schools, or special technical schools of 
middle or secondary grade has been of much value in diffusing 
scientific knowledge and scientific methods of thinking and work- 



ing among large numbers of people, as well as in revealing to 
many the possibilities of a scientific career. The great and im- 
portant development of scientific instruction, however, since about 
i860, has been in the fields of advanced applied science or techni- 
cal education, and has taken place chiefly in new and higher spe- 
cialized schools and research foundations. The fields in which 
the greatest scientific advances have been made, and to which we 
shall here briefly refer, have been engineering, agriculture, and 
medicine. 

The beginnings of technical education. The beginnings of 
technical education were made earliest in France, Germany, and 
the United States, and in the order named. France and German 
lands, but particularly France, inherited through the monasteries 
what survived of the old Roman skills and technical arts. In the 
building of bridges, roads, fortifications, aqueducts, and imposing 
public buildings, the Romans had shown the possession of en- 
gineering abihty of a high order. Some of this knowledge was re- 
tained by the monks of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by 
the monasteries they erected and the churches they built. Later 
it passed to others, and is evidenced in the great cathedrals and 
town halls of Europe, and particularly of northern France. 

In military and civil engineering the French were also the true 
successors of the Romans. As early as 1747 a special engineering 
school for bridges and highways {Ecole des Fonts et Chaussees) had 
been created, and a little later a special school to train mining en- 
gineers {Ecole des Mines) was added. These were the first of the 
world's higher technical schools. After the Revolution, the new 
need for military and medical knowledge, as well as the general 
French interest in applied science, led to the creation of a large 
number of important higher technical institutions (list, p. 518), 
most of which have persisted to the present and been enlarged 
and extended with time. Napoleon also created a School of Arts 
and Trades (R. 282), and a number of military schools (p. 590). 

In German lands there was early founded a series of trade 
schools,^ which have in time been developed into important tech- 
nical universities. After the creation of the Imperial German 
Empire, in 1871, these schools were especiaUy favored by the 

* The oldest was Charlottenburg (1799), Darmstadt (1822), Carlsruhe (1825), 
Munich (1827), Dresden (1828), Nuremberg (1829), Stuttgart (1829), Cassel (1830), 
Hanover (1831), Augsburg (1833), and Brunswick (1835). A similar school, which 
later developed into a technical university, was foianded at Prague, in Bohemia, in 
1806. 



790 MlblUKY Ut t.UUCAriON 

government, and their work was raised to a rank equal to that of 
the older universities. To the excellent training given in these 
institutions the German leadership in applied science and indus- 
try, before 1914, was largely due.^ It has been the particular 
function of these technical universities to apply scientific knowl- 
edge to the industries and the arts, and to show the technical 
schools beneath and the directors of German industries how further 
to apply it (R. 371). Of their work a recent Report - well says: 

While in other countries the development of science has been aca- 
demic, in Germany every new principle elaborated by science has 
revolutionized some industry, modified some manufacturing process, 
or opened up an entirely new field of commercial exploitation. In the 
chemical industries of Germany , . . there is one trained university 
chemist for every forty working-people. It is important to realize 
that the development of Germany's manufactures and commerce has 
depended not upon the establishment of any monopoly in the domain 
of science, not upon any special advancement of science within her own 
boundaries, but primarily upon the practical utilization of the results 
of scientific research in Germany and other countries. 

The creation of the United States Military Academy, at West 
Point, in 1802, marks the American beginnings in technical edu- 
cation. In 1824 the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was begun, 
largely as a manual-labor school after the Fellenberg plan, to give 
instruction "in the applications of science to the common pur- 
poses of life," and about 1850 this developed into one of the ear- 
liest of our four-year engineering colleges. In 1846 the United 
States organized a college for naval engineering, at Annapolis, to 
do for the Navy what West Point had done for the Army. In 1 86 1 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, opening 
its doors in 1865. This was the first of a number of important 
new engineering colleges, and eight others had been established, 
by private funds, before 1880. 

The development in England came a little later. Good en- 
gineering schools have since been developed in connection with 

^ The German technical training "produces an engineer who is not only older in 
years, but also more mature in experience and in judgment than the average gradu- 
ate of an engineering college in America. Whether or not it would be wise to adopt 
— so far as that would be possible — German methods in the schools and colleges 
of the United States, it must nevertheless be recognized that those methods have 
given Germany a leadership in applied science and in industry which she will keep 
unless the educational authorities of other nations find some way of producing men 
of hke calibre." (Munroe, James P., "Technical Education"; in Monroe's Cyclo- 
pedia of Education.) 

2 Report of Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education, Washington, 
1914, p. 90. 



the new municipal universities, while good engineering colleges 
have also been created at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as at the 
Scottish and Irish universities. 

The new impulses to development. During the first six dec- 
ades of the nineteenth century, France, the German States, and 
the United States were slowly moving toward the creation of 
special schools for technical education. After about i860 the 
movement increased with great rapidity. A number of events 
contributed to this change in rate of development, the most im- 
portant of which were : 

1. The development attained by pure science, by about i860. (See 
chapter xxvii, part 11, p. 723.) 

2. The Industrial Revolution (p. 728), which changed nations from 
an agricultural to an industrial status, opened up the possibilities 
of vast world trade, and created enormous demands for techni- 
cally trained men to supervise and develop the rapidly growing 
industries of nations. 

3. The London Exhibition of 1851, which displayed to the world the 
applications of science to trade, manufacturing, and the arts, 
made in particular by England. This opened the eyes of Europe 
and America to the possibilities of technical education, and led to 
the creation, in 1853, of a national Department of Science and 
Art (p. 638) for England. This began the stimulation, by money 
grants, of technical education and instruction in drawing, and 
exerted from the first an important influence on EngHsh educa- 
tion. 

4. The passage by the Congress of the United States of the Morrill 
Land-Grant-College Act, in 1862, which provided for the creation 
of colleges of engineering, military science, and agriculture, in 
each of the American States. 

5. The militarily successful wars of Prussia against Denmark, in 
1864; Austria, 1866; and France, 1870-71. These revealed to 
other nations the importance of sound military and engineering 
education for a nation, and so tremendously stimulated German 
technical education that the new nation soon arose, in many 
lines, to a position of world industrial leadership (369). 

6. The Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, in 1876, which re- 
peated the work of the London Exhibition of 1851, and gave a 
new meaning to the scientific and engineering education then de- 
veloping in the new American Land-Grant Colleges. 

7. The work of Virchow in Germany (1856) in developing pathology; 
of Pasteur in France, after 1859, in establishing the germ theory 
of disease ; the English surgeon Lister, about the same time, in de- 
veloping antiseptic surgery; and the new work of physiologists 
and chemists. Combined these have remade medical science, 
and have opened up immense possibiUties for benefiting man- 
kind. 



800 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Following these important stimuli to activity, the important 
nations of the world began the earnest development of technical 
education, and later medical education, with the result that this 
new development has affected educational practice all over the 
world. The new ideas have spread to all continents, and to-day 
the call for technical education comes not only from the older na- 
tions and such new countries as Canada, Australia, South Africa, 
and the South American States, but from such ancient and back- 
ward civilizations as Japan, China, Siam, the Philippines, the 
East Indies, Egypt, Persia, and Turkey. 

In consequence to-day numerous and expensive engineering 
colleges and research institutions are maintained by the impor- 
tant world nations. To-day the trained engineer goes to work his 
wonders in all corners of the globe, and his task has become pri- 
marily that of organizing and directing men in the work of con- 
trolling the forces and materials of nature so that they may be 
made to benefit the human race. So rapid has been the develop- 
ment that, out of the earher comprehensive type of engineering, 
to-day dozens of specialized types of engineering education and 
specialization have been evolved, covering such related fields as 
civil, mechanical, mining, metallurgical, electrical, architectural, 
chemical, electro-chemical, marine, naval, sanitary, biological, 
and public-health engineering. No longer can a nation hope to 
develop its resources, care properly for the modern needs of its 
people, or be counted among the important industrial or agricul- 
tural nations if it neglects the development of technical educa- 
tion. 

Science applied to agriculture. France also was the direct in- 
heritor, through the monks, of the old Roman agricultural knowl- 
edge and skills, though up to the nineteenth century no attempt 
to organize agricultural instruction took place anywhere in Eu- 
rope. The earliest effort in that direction was a proposal made in 
1775 by Abbe Rosier, in France, to Turgot, then Minister of Fi- 
nance, on " A Plan for a National School of Agriculture." Noth- 
ing coming of the proposal, the Abbe submitted the proposal to 
the National Assembly, in 1789, and the same idea was later pre- 
sented to Napoleon, but without results. The first person to give 
practical form to the idea was Fellenberg (p. 546), who conducted 
his manual-labor agricultural institute at Hofwyl, from 1806 to 
1844, and inaugurated a plan of educational procedure which was 
soon afterwards copied in Switzerland, France, the South German 



States, England, and the United States. One of the earliest in- 
stitutions to be established outside of Switzerland was the Insti- 
tute of Agriculture and Forestry, founded by the Agricultural 
Society of Wiirtemberg, in 1817, at Hohenheim, near Stuttgart. 

The earliest schools to teach agriculture in France were the 
Royal Agronomic Institution at Grignon (1827); the Institute at 
Coetbo (1830), and the Agricultural School at San Juan (1833). 
By 1847 twenty-five agricultural schools were in operation in 
France, to several of which orphan asylums and penal colonies 
were attached. In 1848 the French Government reorganized the 
instruction in agriculture and gave it a national basis. It ordered 
the creation of a farm school in each department of France; a 
number of higher schools for agricultural instruction at central 
places; and a National Agronomic Institute for more advanced 
instruction. A treasury grant of 2,500,000 francs to estabhsh the 
system was voted. In 1873 elementary instruction in agriculture 
was ordered given in all village and rural elementary schools. 

In the United States a number of agricultural societies were 
formed early in the century, and a private school of agriculture 
was opened in Maine, in 1821, and another in Connecticut, in 
1824. With the opening-up of the new West to farming and the 
change of the East to manufacturing, after about 1825, the agita- 
tion for agricultural education for a time died out, reappearing in 
Michigan, in 1850. In that year a new constitution was adopted 
which required the legislature to create a State School of Agricul- 
ture, and in 1857 the Michigan Agricultural College opened its 
doors. Two years later a ''Farmers' High School," which later 
became the Pennsylvania State College, was opened in central 
Pennsylvania. In 1862, in the midst of the greatest civil war in 
history, the American Congress passed the very important Mor- 
rill Act, which provided for the creation of a college to teach agri- 
culture, mechanic arts, and military science in each of the Ameri- 
can States. It was a decade before many of these institutions 
opened, and for a time they amounted to but little. They had 
but few students, little money, and the instruction was very ele- 
mentary and but poorly organized. Cornell University, in New 
York State, was one of the first (1868) of the new institutions to 
get under way and find its work. The Centennial Exposition 
(1876) gave the needed emphasis to the engineering courses, and 
by 1880 these were well established. The agricultural courses did 
not flourish for two decades longer, and the military science not 



0O2 Jrli:!)HJKY KJf t.UU^I\l IU1\ 

until the World War. Despite feeble beginnings, the result of the 
aid given by the national government has in time proved very- 
valuable, and to-day very large sums of money are being appro- 
priated by the American States and Territories for instruction in 
engineering, agriculture, home economics, and related sciences, 
and large numbers of students are now enrolled for this technical 
training. 

The recent new interest in agricultural education. Since the 
latter part of the nineteenth century agricultural education has 
awakened new interest in many lands. The German States have 
created many schools for instruction in agriculture and forestry. 
Denmark has regenerated the rural life of the nation (R. 370) by 
its "People's High Schools" and its special schools for instruction 
in agriculture. Italy has recently made special efforts to extend 
agricultural instruction to its people. Canada, Australia, and 
New Zealand have established agricultural schools. In Algiers, 
Morocco, Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, good begin- 
nings in agricultural education have been made. 

As agricultural knowledge has been worked out and classified, 
and agricultural instruction has become organized, it has become 
possible to relegate some of the more elementary instruction to 
the school below. This was done in European nations before 
it took place in the United States. In 1888 the first American 
agricultural high school was established in Minnesota. By 
1898 there were ten such schools in the United States, but since 
1900 the development has been very rapid. By 1920 probably 
a thousand high schools were offering instruction in agriculture, 
while elementary instruction in agriculture had been introduced 
into the rural and village schools of practically every American 
agricultural State. 

The agricultural schools, colleges, and experimental stations 
established by the national, state, and local educational authori- 
ties of different nations have added another new division to the 
work of public education, and one which is both very costly and 
very remunerative. Out of the work of these schools has come a 
vast quantity of useful knowledge, and hundreds of important 
applications of science to farm and home life. Old breeds in stock 
and grains have been improved, new breeds have been derived, 
and productivity has been greatly increased. Through the 
teachings of home economics the farmer's home is being trans- 
formed, while the applications of science made in these schools 



NEW TEJNUEJNCIES AND EXPANSIONS 803 

are modifying almost every phase of agricultural life and rural 
living. 

Medicine and sanitary science. Closely related to sanitary, 
biological, and public-health engineering has been the enormous 
recent development of medicine and surgery. Within half a 
century instruction in these subjects has been entirely trans- 
formed, and large and costly laboratories and hospitals are now 
required for the work. There has also been much specialization 
in medical training, within recent years, and especially has pre- 
ventive medicine been developed. Extending the newly found 
biological and medical knowledge to the animal and vegetable 
worlds has resulted in a similar development of veterinary medi- 
cine ^ and plant pathology. A combination of medical knowledge 
with engineering and chemistry has produced the sanitary engi- 
neer, while medical knowledge and applied biology has produced 
the public-health expert.- 

So important, too, has the control of all kinds of disease be- 
come, now that people, animals, insects, plants, and goods move 
so freely along the great trade routes of the world, that nations 
everywhere feel the necessity, now that scientific research has re- 
vealed to questioning man the methods of transmission of the dis- 
eases which once decimated armies and cities, destroyed stocks, 
and ruined harvests, of developing ample quarantine service and 
medical staffs to cope with diseases — human, animal, and plant 
— from without, and to control those which arise within. Na- 
tions too poor as yet to provide such service for themselves are to- 
day having such provision made for them by other nations, or by 
great national foundations,^ so that other lands may be protected 
from the ravages of their diseases and the economic wealth of all 

^ The first veterinary school in the world was established at Lyons, France, in 
1762; the second at Alfort, a suburb of Paris, in 1766; the third at Berlin, in 1792; 
and the fourth at London, in 1793. 

^ The development of scientific training for nursing, begun by the Germans near 
the end of their wars with Napoleon, is another example of the creation of a new pro- 
fession through the application of science. This was carried to new levels by Miss 
Florence Nightingale, who began work in London, in i860, after her experiences in 
the Crimean War of 1854-56, and has been greatly improved since 1870 as a result 
of the new medical knowledge and methods which have come in since that time. 
The provision of training for nurses, and the certification of doctors and nurses for 
practice, are other new developments in the field of state education. Similarly is 
the training and certification of dentists, veterinarians, and pharmacists, all of which 
are nineteenth-century additions. 

' The work of the Rockefeller Foundation, an American Foundation organized 
to promote "the well-being of mankind throughout the world," in spending millions 
to provide China with a modern system of western medical education and hospital 
service, is perhaps the greatest example of a scientifically organized service ever 
Tendered by the people of one nation to those of another. 



8o4 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



may be increased. The element of Christian charity has also en- 
tered into the service, the labors of Dr. Grenfell in Labrador, and 
the work of the Rockefeller medical and surgical boat traveling 



^^0%%v&^^^?i 




<^^^ 






FiG. 232. The Peking Union Medical College 

A well-equipped center for instruction in western medicine, endowed by ttie Rocke- 
feller Foundation. A similar school is being created at Shanghai, in central China. 
Existing medical schools at two other points, and nineteen hospitals scattered over 
the Republic, have also been aided by this American foundation. In addition, 
many medical missionaries, Chinese physicians, and nurses have been sent to the 
United States for study. To improve health standards and living conditions 
throughout the world is the purpose of the work of the Foundation, which now has 
work under way on every continent. 

among the Philippine Islands and its hookworm work on every 
continent, being good examples of such Christian effort. 

Applied science the nation's protector. To-day applied science 
stands everywhere as the nation's protector. Applied in sanita- 
tion and preventive medicine it has reduced the death rate, pro- 
longed life, and protects homes from many hidden dangers. In 
the engineering fields it has transformed the face of the earth and 
all our ways of living and doing business. Applied to industry it 
builds factories and railways, and works out new processes to 
eliminate wastes, improve production, and utilize by-products. 
Thousands of labor-saving inventions owe their origin to a new 
truth worked out in some laboratory, and applied in another. 
Applied chemistry has wrought wonders in advancing industry, 
protecting the public welfare, eliminating unnecessary labor, and 
making life richer for all. 

To-day the engineer with his railway and irrigating dam and 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 805 

power plant in the desert has replaced the monk as the vanguard 
of the forces of civiHzation. The scientist in his laboratory in 
part replaces armies and navies as the protector of the nation's 
safety. The scientifically trained Red Cross nurse is fast replac- 
ing the unskilled devotion of the older Sister of Charity. The 
doctor and the surgeon at the medical mission are carrying a very 
practical type of Christian civilization into far-away lands. The 
laboratory expert in the quarantine station has succeeded the 
priest with bell and book in keeping pestilence away from the 
land. The public-health officer in the httle town, and the sanitary 
engineer in the city, protect the health and happiness of millions 
of homes. The plant pathologist and veterinarian guard the 
crops and herds from which food and clothing are derived. The 
scientific experts in plant and animal industries work steadily to 
improve breeds and increase yields. When one compares present- 
day scientific knowledge with that represented in the thirteenth- 
century Encyclopaedia of Bartholomew Anglicus (R. 77); our 
modern knowledge of diseases with the theories as to disease ad- 
vanced by Hippocrates (p. 197), and taught for so many centuries 
in Christian Europe; our modern knowledge of bacterial trans- 
mission with the mediaeval theories of Divine wrath and diabolic 
action; our modern ability to annihilate time and space compared 
with early nineteenth-century conditions ; or modern applied sci- 
ence with the very limited technical knowledge possessed by the 
guilds of the later Middle Ages — the stories of Aladdin and his 
wonderful lamp seem to have been even more than realized in our 
practical everyday life. 

Engineering, agriculture, and modern medicine stand as three 
of the great applications of modern science to human affairs, and 
as three of the most important and costly additions to state edu- 
cational effort made since the time when nations began to accept 
the political philosophy of the eighteenth-century reformers and 
to take over the school from the Church, because by so doing the 
interests of the State could better be advanced thereby. 

III. VOCATIONAL 

What is vocational education? In a certain sense, all education 
is vocational, in that it aims to prepare one for some vocation in 
life. In Greece and Rome education was vocational, in that it 
prepared one to be a citizen in the State. During the Middle 
Ages education was to prepare for a vocation in the Church 



8o6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Later the vocation of a scholar appeared, and still later that of a 
gentleman. In modern times a large range of state services have 
been opened up as vocations. Since the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century, with the extension of educational advantages to 
increasing numbers of the people, preparation for more intelligent 
living and citizenship have come to be new motives in education. 
To-day we no longer use the term vocational education in this 
rather general sense, but restrict its use to the specific training 
of individuals for some useful employment. Training for law, 
medicine, the ministry, teaching, engineering, scientific agricul- 
ture, nursing, and commerce are examples of vocational education 
in its higher ranges. The development of education along these 
lines has previously been described. In this division of this chap- 
ter we shall use the term in a still more common and still more re- 
stricted sense, as meaning the training of the younger people of a 
State to do well certain specific things, by teaching them processes 
and the practical applications of knowledge, chiefly science and 
art, to the work of the vocation they expect to follow to earn 
their living. The Report of the American Commission on National 
Aid to Vocational Education (1914) defined vocational education 
(p. 16) as follows: 

Wherever the term "vocational education" is used in this Report, 
it will mean, unless otherwise explained, that form of education whose 
controlling purpose is to give training of a secondary grade to persons 
over fourteen years of age, for increased efficiency in useful employ- 
ment in the trades and industries, in agriculture, in commerce and 
commercial pursuits, and in callings based upon a knowledge of home 
economics. The occupations included under these are almost endless 
in number and variety. 

The need for vocational education. Used in this sense voca- 
tional education is an application of technical knowledge, worked 
out in the higher schools, to the ordinary vocations of a modern 
industrial world. As such it is a product of the Industrial Revolu- 
tion and the breakdown of the age-old system of apprenticeship 
training,^ and represents another of the important recent exten- 

1 "Large-scale production, extreme division of labor, and the all-conquering 
march of the machine, have practically driven out the apprenticeship system 
through which, in a simpler age, young helpers were taught, not simply the tech- 
nique of some single process, but the 'arts and mysteries of a craft' as well. The 
journeyman and the artisan have given way to an army of machine workers, per- 
forming over and over one small process at one machine, turning out one small part 
of the finished article, and knowing nothing about the business beyond their narrow 
and limited task." {Report 0/ the Commission on National Aid to Vocational Educa- 
tion vol. I, pp. 19-20.) 



sions of educational advantages to the masses of the people who 
labor with their hands to earn their daily bread. 

Besides further democratizing education by extending its ad- 
vantages to those who work in the shop and the office and on the 
farm, vocational education tends to correct many of the evils of 
modern industrial life. It puts the worker in possession of a great 
body of scientific knowledge relating to his work which shops and 
offices cannot give, and it keeps him, for several years after he be- 
comes a wage earner and at a very impressionable period of his 
life, under the directing care of the school. It thus tends "to 
counteract the specialization and routine of the workshop, which 
wears out his body before nature has completed its development 
in form and power, blunts the intelligence which the school had 
tried to awaken, shrivels up his heart and imagination, and de- 
stroys his spirit of work." 

Vocational education in Europe and the United States. For al- 
most half a century the leading nations of western Europe, in an 
effort to readjust their age-old apprenticeship system of training 
to modern conditions of manufacture, and to develop new na- 
tional prestige and strength, have given careful attention to the 
education of such of their children as were destined for the voca- 
tions of the industrial world. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, 
and France have been leaders, with Germany most prominent of 
all.^ No small part of the great progress made by that country in 
securing world-wide trade, ^ before the World War, was due to the 
extensive and thorough system of vocational education worked 
out for German youths (R. 371). In commercial education, too, 
the Germans, up to 19 14, led the world. Even more, they were 
the only great national group which had done much to develop 
commercial training. Next to Germany probably came the 
United States. The marked economic progress of Switzerland 
during the past quarter-century has likewise been due in large 
part to that type of education which would enable her, by skillful 

1 "In no country will you find the problem taken up in so thorough a manner; in 
no country will you find an attempt made to cover, by means of industrial schools, 
the occupations of everyone, from the lowly laborer to the director of the great 
manufacturing establishment. The State provided industrial training for every per- 
son who will be better off with it than without it. No occupation is too humble to 
receive the attention of the German authorities; and the opinion prevails there that 
science and art have a place in every occupation known to man." (Cooley, E. G., 
in Report to the Commercial Club of Chicago, 191 2.) 

2 For example, the foreign trade of Germany, in 1880, was $31 per capita of the 
total population, and that of the United States was $32. Thirty years later, in 
1910, Germany's foreign trade had increased to $62 per capita, and that of the 
United States to only $37, 



80« 



nibiUKY ^t tvlJUL^AilUlN 



artisanship, to make the most of her very limited resources. 
France has profited greatly, during the past half-century also, 
from vocational education along the lines of agriculture and in- 
dustrial art. In Denmark, agricultural education has remade 
the nation (R. 370), since the days of its humiliation and spolia- 
tion at the hands of Prussia. England, though keenly sensitive to 
German trade competition, made only very moderate efforts in 
the direction of vocational education until Germany plunged the 
world in war in an effort more quickly to dominate commercially. 
Now, in the Fisher Education Act of 1918 (p. 649), England has 
at last laid foundations for a great national system of vocational 
education. Japan, also, recently laid large plans for a national 
system of vocational training. 

In the United States but httle attention was given to educating 
young people for the vocations of Hfe until about 1905-10, though 

modern manufacturing condi- 
tions had before this largely 
destroyed the old apprentice- 
ship type of training. En- 
dowed with enormous natural 
resources; not being pressed 
for the means of subsistence 
by a rapidly expanding popu- 
lation on a limited land area; 
able to draw on Europe for 
both cheap manual labor and 
technically educated workers; 
largely isolated and self-suffi- 
cient as a nation; lacking a 
merchant marine; not being 
thrown into severe competi- 
tion for international trade; 
and able to sell its products ^ to 
nations anxious to buy them 
and willing to come for them in their own ships ; the people of the 
United States did not, up to recently, feel any particular need for 
anything other than a good common-school education or a general 
high-school education for their workers. The commercial course 
in the high school, the manual- training schools and courses, and 

1 Chiefly raw products — a prodigal waste of natural resources. What every 
nation should do is to work up its raw products at home, and sell finished goods 
rather than raw products — "sell brains, rather than materials." (R. 370.) 




Fig. 233. The Destruction of the 
Trades in Modern Industry 

Under the old conditions of apprenticeship 
a boy learned all the processes and became 
a tailor. To-day, in a thoroughly organized 
clothing factory, thirty-nine different per- 
sons perform different specialized opera- 
tions in the manufacture of a coat. 



some instruction in drawing and creative art were felt to be 
about all that it was necessary to provide. 

The National Commission on Vocational Education. Largely 
since 1910, due in part to expanding world commerce and in- 
creasing competition in world trade ; in part to a national realiza- 
tion that the battles of the future are to be largely commercial 
battles ; and in part to the dawning upon the American people of 
the conception, first thought out and put into practice by Impe- 
rial Germany (R. 371), that that nation will triumph in foreign 
trade, with all that such triumph means to-day in terms of the 
happiness and welfare of its citizenship (R. 372), which puts the 
greatest amount of skill and brains into what it produces and 
sells. 

After a number of sporadic efforts in different parts of the 
country,^ and the introduction of a number of bills into Congress 
which failed to secure passage, the favorite EngHsh plan was fol- 
lowed and a Presidential Commission was appointed (19 13) to in- 
quire into the matter, and to report on the desirability and feasi- 
bility of some form of national aid to stimulate the development 
of vocational education. The Commission made its report in 
1 9 14, and submitted a plan for gradually increasing national aid 
to the States to assist them in developing and maintaining what 
will \ irtually become a national system of agricultural, trade, 
commercial, and home-economics education. 

The Commission's findings. The Commission found that 
there were, in 1910, in round numbers, 12,500,000 persons en- 
gaged in agriculture in the United States, of whom not over one 
per cent had had any adequate preparation for farming; and that 
there were 14,250,000 persons engaged in manufacturing and 
mechanical pursuits, not one per cent of whom had had any op- 
portunity for adequate training. ^ In the whole United States 
there were fewer trade schools, of all kinds, than existed in the lit- 
tle German kingdom of Bavaria, a State about the size of South 
Carolina; while the one Bavarian city of Munich, a city about the 

1 The first trade school in the United States was established privately, in New 
York City, in 188 1. By 1900 some half-dozen had been similarly established in dif- 
ferent parts of the country. In 1902 a trade school for girls was founded in New 
York City, which did pioneer work. In 1906 Massachusetts created a State Com- 
mission on Industrial Education, and later provided for the creation of industrial 
schools. In 1907 Wisconsin enacted the first trade-school law, and New York State 
followed in 1909. 

* Germany before 19 14 formed an interesting contrast to such conditions. There 
few untrained youths were to be found, and the nation, before 1914, was rapidly 
moving toward universal vocational education. 



»IO 



HlblUKY Ut t.UUL.A I lUi^ 



size of Pittsburgh, had more trade schools than were to be found 
in all the larger cities of the United States, put together. The 
Commission further found that there were 25,000,000 persons in 



100; 



Years of Age 
16 17 _ 18 




Fig. 234. School attendance of American Children, Fourteen 
TO Twenty Years of Age 

Based on an estimate made by the United States Bureau of Education in 
1907 (Bulletin No. i, p. 29), and based on conditions then existing, but 
probably still approximately true. In evening schools all classes were 
counted — public, private, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.CA., etc. Public and pri- 
vate day schools, both elementary and secondary, also were counted. 

the nation, eighteen years of age or over, engaged in farming, 
mining, manufacturing, and mechanical pursuits, and in trade 
and transportation, and of these the Report said : 

If we assume that a system of vocational education, pursued through 
the years of the past, would have increased the wage-earning capacity 
of each of these persons to the extent of only ten cents a day, this 
would have made an increase of wages for the group of $2,500,000 a 
day, or $750,000,000 a year, with all that this would mean to the 
wealth and life of the nation. 

This is a very moderate estimate, and the facts would probably show 
a difference between the earning power of the vocationally trained and 
the vocationally untrained of at least twenty-five cents a day. This 
would indicate a waste of wages, through lack of training, amounting 
to $6,250,000 every day, or $1,875,000,000 for the year. 

The Commission estimated that a million new young people 
were required annually by our industries, and that it would need 
three years of vocational education, beyond the elementary-school 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 8ll 

age, to prepare them for efficient service. This would require 
that three million young people of elementary-school age be con- 
tinually enrolled in schools offering some form of vocational train- 
ing. This was approximately three times the number of young 
people then enrolled in all public and private high schools in the 
United States, and following any kind of a course of study. In 
addition, the untrained adult workers then in farming and in- 
dustry also needed some form of adult or extension education 
to enable them to do more effective work. The Commission 
further pointed out that there were in the United States, in 1910, 
7,220,298 young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen 
years, only i ,032,461 of whom were enrolled in a high school of any 
type, pubhc or private, day or evening (Fig. 234), and few of 
those enrolled were pursuing studies of a technical type. 

American beginnings; meaning of the work. In 191 7 the 
American Congress made the beginnings of what is destined to 
develop rapidly into a truly national system of vocational educa- 
tion for the boys and girls of secondary-school age in the United 
States. This new addition to the systems of pubhc instruction 
now provided is one which in time will bring returns out of all 
proportion to its costs. Without it the national prosperity and 
happiness would be at stake, and the position the United States 
has attained in the markets of the world could not possibly be 
maintained (R. 372). 

This new American legislation is based on the best continental 
European experience, and is somewhat typical of recent national 
legislation for similar objects elsewhere. It is to include voca- 
tional training for agriculture, the trades and industries, com- 
merce, and home economics. ^ A certain portion of the money 
appropriated annually by the national government is to be used 
for making or cooperating in studies and investigations as to 
needs and courses in agriculture, home economics, trades, indus- 
tries, and commerce. The courses must be given in the public 

1 As illustrative of the general character of the vocations to be trained for, a few 
of the more common ones may be mentioned: 

In agriculture: The work of general farming, orcharding, dairying, poultry-raising, 
truck gardening, horticulture, bee culture, and stock-raising. 

In the trades and industries: The work of the carpenter, mason, baker, stonecutter, 
electrician, plumber, machinist, toolmaker, engineer, miner, painter, typesetter, 
linotype operator, shoecutter and laster, tailor, garment maker, straw-hat maker, 
weaver, and glove maker. 

In commerce and commercial pursuits: The work of the bookkeeper, clerk, stenog- 
rapher, typist, auditor, and accountant. 

In home economics: The work of the dietitian, cook and housemaid, institution 
manager, and household decorator. 



8I2 HISTORY UK EUUCATIUP^ 

schools ; must be for those over fourteen years of age and of less 
than college grade ; and must be primarily intended for those who 
are preparing to enter or who have entered (part-time classes) a 
trade or a useful industrial pursuit. 

As nation after nation becomes industrialized, as all except the 
smallest and poorest nations are bound to become in time, voca- 
tional education for its workers in the field, shop, and office will be 
found to be another state necessity. Only the State can ade- 
quately provide this, for only the State can finance or properly 
organize and integrate the work of so large and so important an 
undertaking. Though costly, this new extension of state educa- 
tional effort will be found to be a wise business investment for 
every industrial and commercial nation. Considered nationally, 
the workers of any nation not provided with vocational education 
tvill find themselves unable to compete with the workers of other 
nations which do provide such specialized training. 

IV. SOCIOLOGICAL 

A new estimate as to the value of child life. As we saw in 
chapter xviii, which described the opportunities for and the kind 
of schooling developed up to the middle of the eighteenth century, 
but little of what may be called formal education had been pro- 
vided up to then for the great mass of children, even in the most 
progressive nations. We also noted the extreme brutality of the 
school. Such was the history of childhood, so far as it may be said 
to have had a history at all, up to the rise of the great humanita- 
rian movement early in the nineteenth century.^ Neglect, abuse, 
mutilation, excessive labor, heavy punishments, and often virtual 
slavery awaited children everywhere up to recent times. The 
sufferings of childhood at home were added to by others in the 
school (p. 455) for such as frequented these institutions. 

After the coming of mills and manufacturing the lot of children 
became, for a time, worse than before. The demand for cheap 
labor led to the apprenticing of children to the factories to tend 
machines, instead of to a master to learn a trade, and there they 

^ "The snail's pace at which the race has moved toward humanitarianism is 
indicated by Payne's estimate (p. 6) that the race is perhaps two hundred and 
forty thousand years old, civilized man a few hundred years old, and a humanitarian- 
ism large enough to have any real concern in any organized fashion for the protec- 
tion of children scarcely fifty years old. The fact that organizations in great num- 
ber, laws, penalties, and constant vigilance are still everywhere needed to secure for 
children their inherent rights is evidence enough that we have still a long way to go 
before we reach the golden age." (Waddel, C. W., An Introduction to Child Psy- 
chology, p. S-) 



became virtual slaves and their treatment was most inhuman.' 
Conditions were worse in England than elsewhere, not because 
the English were more brutal than the French or the Germans, but 
because the Industrial Revolution began earlier in England and 
before the rise of humanitarian influences. England was a manu- 
facturing nation decades before France, and longer still before 
Germany. By the time Germany had changed from an agricul- 
tural to a manufacturing nation (after 1871), the new humani- 
tarianism and new economic conditions had placed a new value on 
child life and child welfare. 

Since about 1850 an entirely new estimate has come to be placed 
on the importance of national attention to child welfare, though 
the beginnings of the change date back much earlier. As we have 
seen (p. 325), England early began to care for the children of its 
poor. In the Poor-Relief and Apprenticeship Law of 1601 (R. 
174) England organized into law the growing practice of a century 
(p. 326) and laid the basis for much future work of importance. 
In this legislation, as we have seen, the foundations of the Massa- 
chusetts school law of 1642 were laid. In the Virginia laws of 
1643 and 1646 (R. 200 a) and the Massachusetts law of 1660, pro- 
viding for the apprenticeship of orphans and homeless children, 
the beginnings of child-welfare work in the American Colonies 
were made. 

Many of the Catholic religious orders in Europe had for long 
cared for and brought up poor and neglected children, and in 1729 
the first private orphanage in the new world was established by 
the Ursulines (p. 346) in New Orleans. The first public orphan- 
age in America was established in Charleston, South Carolina, 
in 1790; the first in England at Birmingham, in 181 7; and in 1824 
the New York House of Refuge was founded. The latter was the 
forerunner of the juvenile reformatory institutions established 
later by practically all of the American States. These have de- 
veloped chiefly since 1850. To-day most of the American States 
and governments in many other lands also provide state homes 

1 "As late as 1840 children of ten to fifteen years of age and younger v/ere driven 
by merciless overseers for ten, twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours a day in the lace 
mills. Fed the coarsest food, in ways more disgusting than those of the boarding 
schools described by Dickens, they slept, when they had opportunity, often in re- 
lays, in beds that were constantly occupied. They lived and toiled, day and night, 
in the din and noise, filth and stench, of the factory' that coined their life's blood into 
gold for their exploiters. Sometimes with chains about their ankles, to prevent 
their attempts to escape, they labored until epidemics, disease, or premature death 
brought welcome relief from a slavery that was forbidden by law for ncf ro slaves in 
the colonies." (Payne, G. H., The Child in Human Progress.) 



for orphan and neglected children, where they are clothed, fed, 
cared for, educated, and trained for some useful employment. 

Child-labor legislation. One of the best evidences of the new 
nineteenth-century humanitarianism is to be found in the large 
amount of child-labor legislation which arose, largely after 1850, 
and which has been particularly prominent since 1900. 

Under the earlier agricultural conditions and the restricted de- 
mand for education for ordinary life needs, child labor was not 
especially harmful, as most of it was out of doors and under rea- 
sonably good health conditions. With the coming of the factory 
system, the rise of cities and the city congestion of population, 
and other evils connected with the Industrial Revolution, the whole 
situation was changed. Humanitarians now began to demand 
legislation to restrict the evils that had arisen. This demand 
arose earliest in England, and resulted in the earliest legislation 
there. 

The year 1802 is important in the history of child- welfare work 
for the enactment, by the English Parliament, of the first law to 
regulate the employment of children in factories. This was 
known as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (R. 373). 
This Act, though largely ineffectual at the time, ordered impor- 
tant reforms which aroused public opinion and which later bore 
important fruit. By it the employment of work-house orphans 
was limited; it forbade the labor of children under twelve, for 
more than twelve hours a day; provided that night labor of chil- 
dren should be discontinued, after 1804; ordered that the children 
so employed must be taught reading and writing and ciphering, 
be instructed in religion one hour a week, be taken to church 
every Sunday, and be given one new suit of clothes a year ; ordered 
separate sleeping apartments for the two sexes, and not over two 
children to a bed ; and provided for the registration and inspection 
of factories. This law represents the beginnings of modern child- 
labor legislation. It was 1843 before any further child-labor 
legislation of importance was enacted, and 1878 before a compre- 
hensive child-labor bill was finally passed. In the United States 
the first laws regulating the employment of children and provid- 
ing for their school attendance were enacted by Rhode Island in 
1840, and Massachusetts in 1842. Factory legislation in other 
countries has been a product of more recent forces and times. 

To-day important child-labor legislation has been enacted by 
all progressive nations, and the leading world nations have taken 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 815 

advanced ground on the question. All recent thinking is opposed 
to children engaging in productive labor. With the rise of organ- 
ized labor, and the extension of the suffrage to the laboring man, 
he has joined the humanitarians in opposition to his children be- 
ing permitted to labor. From an economic point of view also, all 
recent studies have shown the unprofitableness of child labor and 
the large money-value, under present industrial conditions, of a 
good education. As a result of much agitation and the spread of 
popular education, it has at last come to be a generally accepted 
principle (R. 374) that it is better for children and better for soci- 
ety that they should remain in school until they are at least four- 
teen years of age, and be specially trained for some useful type of 
work. Shown to be economically unprofitable, and for long 
morally indefensible, child labor is now rapidly being superseded 
by suitable education and the vocational training and guidance 
of youth in all progressive nations. 

Compulsory school-attendance legislation. The natural corol- 
lary of the taxation of the wealth of the State to educate the chil- 
dren of the State, and the prohibition of children to labor, is the 
compulsion of children to attend school that they may receive the 
instruction and training which the State has deemed it wise to 
tax its citizens to provide. 

Except in the German States, compulsory education is a rela- 
tively recent idea, though in its origins it is a child of the Protes- 
tant Reformation theory as to education for salvation. Luther 
and his followers had stood for the education of all, supported by 
(R. 156) and enforced by (R. 158) the State. This idea of the edu- 
cation of all to read the Bible took deep root, as we have seen, with 
both Lutherans and Calvinists. In 1619 the httle Duchy of Wei- 
mar made the school attendance of all children, six to twelve 
years of age, compulsory, and the same idea was instituted in 
Gotha by Duke Ernest (p. 317), in 1642; the same year that the 
Massachusetts General Court ordered the Selectmen of the towns 
to ascertain if parents and the masters of apprentices (R. 190) 
were training their children "in learning and labor" and "to read 
and understand the principles of rehgion and the capital laws of 
the country." This latter law is remarkable in that, for the first 
time in the English-speaking world, a legislative body represent- 
ing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read. 
Five years later (1647) the Massachusetts Court ordered the es- 
tabhshment of schools (R. 191) better to enforce the compulsion, 



8i6 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

and thus laid the foundations upon which the American public- 
school systems have since been built. In Holland, the Synod of 
Dort (1618) had tried to institute the idea of compulsory educa- 
tion (R. 176), and in 1646 the Scotch Parliament had ordered the 
compulsory establishment of schools (R. 179). 

In German lands the compulsory-attendance idea took deep 
root, and in consequence the Germans were the first important 
modern nation to enforce, thoroughly, the education of all. In 
1717 King Frederick William I issued (p. 555) the first compul- 
sory-education law for Prussia, ordering that "hereafter wherever 
there are schools in the place the parents shall be obliged, under 
severe penalties, to send their children to school, . . . daily in 
winter, but in summer at least twice a week." He further ordered 
that the fees for the poor were to be paid "from the community's 
funds." Finally Frederick the Great organized the earlier pro- 
cedure into comprehensive codes, and made (1763, R. 274, § 10; 
1765, R. 275 d) detailed provisions relating to the compulsion to 
attend the schools. In the Code of 1794 (p. 565) the final legisla- 
tive step was taken when it was ordered that "the instruction in 
school must be continued until the child is found to possess the 
knowledge necessary to every rational being." By the middle of 
the eighteenth century the basis was clearly laid in Prussia for 
that enforcement of the compulsion to attend schools which, by 
the middle of the nineteenth century, had become such a notable 
characteristic of all German education. The same compulsory 
idea early took deep root among the Scandinavian peoples. In 
consequence the lowest illiteracy in Europe, at the beginning of 
the nineteenth century, was to be found (see map, p. 714) among 
the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans. 

The compulsory-attendance idea died out in America, in the 
Netherlands, and in part in Scotland. In England and in the 
Anglican Colonies in America it never took root. In France the 
idea awaited the work of the National Convention, which (1792) 
ordered three years of education compulsory for all. War and 
the lack of interest of Napoleon in primary education caused the 
requirement, however, to become a dead letter. The Law of 1833 
provided for but did not enforce it, and real compulsory education 
in France did not come until 1882. In England the compulsory 
idea received but Httle attention until after 1870, met with much 
opposition, and only recently have comprehensive reforms been 
provided. In the United States the new beginnings of compul- 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 817 

sory-attendance legislation date from the Rhode Island child- 
labor law of 1840, and the first modern compulsory-attendance 
law enacted by Massachusetts, in 1852. By 1885, fourteen 
American States and six Territories had enacted some form of 
compulsory-attendance law. Since 1900 there has been a general 
revision of American state legislation on the subject, with a view 
to increasing and the better enforcement of the compulsory-at- 
tendance requirements, and with a general demand that the 
National Congress should enact a national child-labor law. 

As a result of this legislation the labor of young children has 
been greatly restricted; work in many industries has been pro- 
hibited entirely, because of the danger to life and health ; compul- 
sory education has been extended in a majority of the American 
States to cover the full school year; poverty, or dependent par- 
ents, in many States no longer serves as an excuse for non-attend- 
ance; often those having physical or mental defects also are in- 
cluded in the compulsion to attend, if their wants can be provided 
for ; the school census has been changed so as to aid in the location 
of children of compulsory school-attendance age; and special offi- 
cers have been authorized or ordered appointed to assist school 
authorities in enforcing the compulsory-attendance and child- 
labor laws. Having taxed their citizens to provide schools, the 
different States now require children to attend and partake of the 
advantages provided. The schools, too, have made a close study 
of retarded pupils, because of the close connection found to exist 
between retardation in school and truancy and juvenile delin- 
quency. 

One result of this legislation. One of the results of all this 
legislation has been to throw, during the past quarter of a cen- 
tury, an entirely new burden on schools everywhere. Such legis- 
lation has brought into the schools not only the truant and the in- 
corrigible, who under former conditions either left early or were 
expelled, but also many children who have no aptitude for book 
learning, and many of inferior mental qualities who do not profit 
by ordinary classroom procedure. Still more, they have brought 
into the school the crippled, tubercular, deaf, epileptic, and blind, 
as well as the sick, needy, and physically unfit. By steadily rais- 
ing the age at which children may leave school, from ten or twelve 
up to fourteen and sixteen, schools everywhere have come to con- 
tain many children who, having no natural aptitude for study, 
would at once, unless specially handled, become a nuisance in the 



8i8 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

school and tend to demoralize schoolroom procedure. These laws 
have thrown upon the school a new burden in the form of public 
expectancy for results, whereas a compulsory-education law can- 
not create capacity to profit from education. Under the earlier 
educational conditions the school, unable to handle or educate 
such children, dealt with them much as the Church of the time 
dealt with religious delinquents. It simply expelled them or let 
them drop from school, and no longer concerned itself about them. 
To-day the public expects the school to retain and get results 
with them. Consequently, within the past twenty -five years the 
whole attitude of the school toward such children has undergone a 
change; many different kinds of classes and courses, that might 
serve better to handle them, have been introduced; and an at- 
tempt has been made to salvage them and turn back to society as 
many of them as possible, trained for some form of social and per- 
sonal usefulness. 

The education of defectives. Another nineteenth-century ex- 
pansion of state education has come in the provision now gener- 
ally made for the education of defectives. To-day the state 
school systems of Christian nations generally make some provi- 
sion for state institutional care, and often for local classes as well, 
for the training of children who belong to the seriously defec- 
tive classes of society. This work is almost entirely a product of 
the new humanitarianism of modern times. Excepting the edu- 
cation of the deaf, seriously begun a little earlier, all effective 
work dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. At first 
the feasibility of all such instruction was doubted, and the work 
generally was commenced privately. Out of successes thus> 
achieved, public institutions have been built up to carry on, on a 
large scale, what was begun privately on a small scale. It is now 
felt to be better for the State, as well as for the unfortunates 
themselves, that they be cared for and educated, as suitably and 
well as possible, for self-respect, self-support, and some form of 
social and vocational usefulness. In consequence, the compul- 
sory-attendance laws of the leading world States to-day require 
that defectives, between certain ages at least, be sent to a state 
institution or be enrolled in a public-school class specialized for 
their training. 

Beginnings of the work. Up to the middle of the eighteenth 
century a number of private efforts at the education of the deaf 
are on record, all dating however from the pioneer work of a Soan- 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 819 




Fig. 235. 

Abbe de l'Epee 

(1712-89) 



ish Benedictine, in 1578. In 1760 a new era in the education of 
the deaf was begun when Abbe de l'Epee opened a school at Paris 
for the oral instruction of poor deaf mutes, 
and Thomas Braidwood (17 15-1806) be- 
gan similar work at Edinburgh, A few 
years later (1778) a third school was opened 
at Leipzig. This last was established 
under the patronage of the Elector of 
Saxony, and was the first school of its 
kind in the world to receive government 
recognition. The Paris school was taken 
over as a state institution by the Consti- 
tuent Assembly, in 1 79 1. In England the 
instruction of the deaf remained a private 
and a family monopoly until 1819. In 
1 8 1 7 the first school in America was opened, 
at Hartford, Connecticut, by the Rever- 
end Thomas H. Gallaudet, and Massa- 
chusetts, in 1819, sent the first pupils paid 
for at state expense to this institution. In 1823 Kentucky cre- 
ated the first state school for the training of the deaf established 

in the new world, and 
Ohio the second, in 
1827. 

The education of 
the blind began in 
France, in 1784; Eng- 
land, in 1 791; Aus- 
tria, in 1804; Prussia, 
in 1806; Holland, in 
1808; Sweden, in 18 10; 
Denmark, in 181 1; 
Scotland, in 1812; in 
BostonandNewYork, 
in 1832; and in Phila- 
delphia, in 1833. All 
were private institu- 
tions, and general in- 
terest in the education of the blind was awakened later by exhibit- 
ing the pupils trained. The first book for the blind was printed 
in Paris, in 1786. The first kindergarten for the blind was estab- 




FiG. 236. Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet 

TEACHING THE DeAF AKD DuMB 

From a bas-relief on the monument of Gallaudet, 
erected by the deaf and dumb of the United States, 
in the grounds of the American Asylum, at Hartford, 
Connecticut. 



820 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 



lished in Germany, in 1861 ; the first school for the colored blind, 
by North Carolina, in 1869. 

Before the nineteenth century the feeble-minded and idiotic 
were the laughing-stock of society, and no one thought of being 
able to do anything for them. In 181 1 Napoleon ordered a cen- 
sus of such individuals, and in 1816 the first school for their train- 
ing was opened at Salzburg, Austria. The school was unsuccess- 
ful, and closed in 1835. The real beginning of the training of the 
feeble-minded was made in France, by Edouard Seguin, "The 
Apostle of the Idiot," in 1837, when he began a life-long study of 
such defectives. By 1845 three or four institutions had been 
opened in Switzerland and Great Britain for their study and 
training, and for a time an attempt was made to effect cures. 
Gallaudet had tried to educate such children at Hartford, about 
1820, and a class for idiots was established at the Blind Asylum in 
Boston, in 1848. The interest thus aroused led to the creation of 



STATE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS 


















Normal 
Schools 






Special State 
Institutions for 






Colleges 

and 

Universities 




/ 


/ 


X 


\ 


\ 


\ 




Agricultural 
Schools 




X 










\ 




Industrial 
Schools 




Feeble 
Minded 




Cripples 
' Dependents 




Incorrigibles 












/ 


















\ 


Blind 




Idiots 




Orphans 
Neglected 




Penitentiary 
for First 
Offenders 




Deaf 



Fig. 237. Educational Institutions maintained by the State 
As state institutions, other than public schools. 

the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, 
in 1851, the first institution of its kind in the United States. In 
1867 the first city school class to train children of low-grade in- 
telligence was organized in Germany, and all the larger cities of 
Germany later organized such special classes. Norway followed 
with a similar city organization, in 1874; and England, Switzer- 
land, and Austria, about 1892. The first American city to organ- 
ize such classes was Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893. Since 
that time special classes for children of low-grade mentality have 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 821 

become a common feature of the large city school systems in most 
American cities. 

In 1832 the first attempt to educate crippled children, as such, 
was made in Munich. The model school in Europe for the educa- 
tion of cripples was established in Copenhagen, in 1872. The 
work was begun privately in New York City, in 1861, and first 
publicly in Chicago, in 1899. The London School Board first be- 
gan such classes in England, in 1898. 

Dependents, orphans, children of soldiers and sailors, and in- 
corrigibles of various classes represent others for whom modern 
States have now provided special state institutions. To-day a 
modern State finds it necessary to provide a number of such spe- 
cialized institutions, or to make arrangements with neighboring 
States for the care of its dependents, if it is to meet what have 
come to be recognized as its humanitarian educational duties. 
The more important of these special state institutions are shown 
in the diagram given in Fig. 237. 

Public playgrounds and play directors, vacation schools, juve- 
nile courts, disciplinary classes, parental schools, classes for moth- 
ers, visiting home-teachers and nurses, and child- welfare societies 
and officers, are other means for caring for child life and child wel- 
fare which have all been begun within the past half-century. The 
significance of these additions lies chiefly in that the history of the 
attitude of nations toward their child life is the history of the rise 
of humanitarianism, altruism, justice, order, morality, and civili- 
zation itself. 

The education of superior children. All the work described 
above and relating to the work of defectives, delinquents, and 
children for some reason in need of special attention and care has 
been for those who represent the less capable and on the whole 
less useful members of society — the ones from whom society 
may expect the least. They are at the same time the most costly 
wards of the State. 

Wholly within the second decade of the present century, and 
largely as a result of the work of the French psychologist Alfred 
Binet (1857-1911) we are now able to sort out, for special atten- 
tion, a new class of what are known as superior, or gifted children, 
and to the education of these special attention is to-day here and 
there beginning to be directed. Educationally, it is an attempt to 
do for democratic forms of national organization what a two-class 
school system does for monarchical forms, but to select intellec- 



S22 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

tual capacity from the whole mass of the people, rather than from 
a selected class or caste. We know now that the number of chil- 
dren of superior ability is approximately as large as the number of 
the feeble in mind, and also that the future of democratic govern- 
ments hinges largely upon the proper education and utilization of 
these superior children. One child of superior intellectual capac- 
ity, educated so as to utilize his talents, may confer greater bene- 
fits upon mankind, and be educationally far more important, than 
a tliousand of the feeble-minded children upon whom we have 
recently come to put so much educational effort and expense. 
Questions relating to the training of leaders for democracy's serv- 
ice attain new significance in terms of the recent ability to meas- 
ure and grade intelligence, as also do questions relating to grad- 
ing, classification in school, choice of studies, rate of advance- 
ment, and the vocational guidance of children in school. 

The new interest in health. Another new expansion of the 

educational service which has come in since the middle of the 

Net Average Worth of a Person nineteenth century, and which has 

recently grown to be one of large 
significance, is work in the medical 
inspection of schools, the supervision 
of the health of pupils, and the new 
instruction in preventive hygiene. 
This is a product of the scientific 
and social and industrial revolu- 
tions which the nineteenth century 
brought, rather than of humanita- 
rian influences, and represents an 
application of newly discovered scientific knowledge to health 
work among children. Its basis is economic, though its results 
are largely physical and educational and social (R. 375). 

The discovery and isolation of bacteria; the vast amount of 
new knowledge which has come to us as to the transmission and 
possibilities for the elimination of many diseases; the spread of 
information as to sanitary science and preventive medicine; the 
change in emphasis in medical practice, from curative to preven- 
tive and remedial; the closer crowding together of all classes of 
people in cities; the change of habits for many from life in the 
open to life in the factory, shop, and apartment; and the growing 
realization of the economic value to the nation of its manhood 
and womanhood; have all alike combined with modern humani- 



Age 




Worth 







$90 


5 




950 


10 




2000 


20 




4000 


30 
40 




4100 
3650 


50 
60 




2900 
1650 


70 

80 




15 

— 700 


(Calculations by Dr. William Farr, former- 
ly Registrar of Vital Statistics for Great 
Britain. Based on pre-war values.) 



NEW TENDENClKb AND EXFANblOJNb «23 

tarianism and applied Christianity to make progressive nations 
take a new interest in child health and proper child development. 
European nations have so far done much more in school health 
work than has the United States, though a very commendable 
beginning has been made here. 

Medical inspection and health supervision. Medical inspec- 
tion of schools began in France, in 1837, though genuine medical 
inspection, in a modern sense, was not begun in France until 1879. 
The pioneer country for real work was Sweden, where health offi- 
cers were assigned to each large school as early as 1868. Norway 
made such appointments optional in 1885, and ol^ligatory in 189 1. 
Belgium began the work in 1874. Tests of eyesight were begun 
in Dresden in 1867. Frankfort-on-Main appointed the first Ger- 
man school physician in 1888. England first employed school 
nurses in 1887; and, in 1907, following the revelations as to low 
physical vitality growing out of the Boer War, adopted a manda- 
tory medical- inspection and health-development act applying to 
England and Wales, and the year following Scotland did the same. 
Argentine and Chili both instituted such service in 1888, and 
Japan made medical inspection compulsory and universal in 
1898. 

In the United States the work was begun voluntarily in Boston, 
in 1894, following a series of epidemics. Chicago organized medi- 
cal inspection in 1895, New York City in 1897, and Philadelphia 
in 1898. From these larger cities the idea spread to the smaller 
ones, at first slowly, and then very rapidly. The first school 
nurse in the United States was employed in New York City, in 
1902, and the idea at once proved to be of great value. In 1906 
Massachusetts adopted the first state medical inspection law. In 
191 2 Minnesota organized the first "State Division of Health 
Supervision of Schools" in the United States, and this plan has 
since been followed by other States. 

From mere medical inspection to detect contagious diseases, in 
which the movement everywhere began, it was next extended to 
tests for eyesight and hearing, to be made by teachers or physi- 
cians, and has since been enlarged to include physical examina- 
tions to detect hidden diseases and a constructive health-program 
for the schools. The work has now come to include eye, ear, nose, 
throat, and teeth, as well as general physical examinations; the 
supervision of the teaching of hygiene in the schools, and to a cer- 
tain extent the physical training and playground activities; and a 



«24 HlblUKY Ub EUULATIUJN 

constructive program for the development of the health and phys- 
ical welfare of all children. All this represents a further exten- 
sion of the public-education idea. 

V. THE SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION 

An important recent development in the field of public educa- 
tion, and in a sense an outgrowth of all the preceding recent de- 
velopment which we have described, has been the organization of 
collegiate and university instruction in the history, theory, prac- 
tice, and administration of education. Still more recent has been 
the organization %i Teachers' Colleges and Schools of Education 
to give advanced training in educational research and in the solu- 
tion of the practical problems of school organization and adminis- 
tration. So important has this recent development become that 
no history of educational progress would be complete without at 
least a brief mention of this recent attempt to give scientific or- 
ganization to the educational process. 

Early beginners. Though the teachers' seminaries had been 
organized in Germany and other northern lands toward the close 
of the eighteenth century, the normal school in France early in the 
nineteenth, and the training-college in England and the normal 
school in the United States by the close of the first third of that 
century, the work in these remained for a long time almost en- 
tirely academic in nature and elementary in character. This was 
also true of the superior normal school for training teachers for 
the lycees of France. 

The reason for this is easy to find. The writings of the earlier 
educational reformers were little known; the contributions of 
Herbart and Froebel had not as yet been popularized; there was 
no organized psychology of the educational process, and no psy- 
chology better than that of John Locke ; the detailed Pestalozzian 
procedure had not as yet been worked out in the form of teaching 
technique; the history of the development of educational theory 
or of educational practice had not been written; and almost no 
philosophy of the educational purpose had been formulated which 
could be used in the training-schools. In consequence the train- 
ing of teachers, both for elementary and secondary instruction,^ 

^ An exception to this statement is to be found in the work of the Pedagogical 
Seminars, organized in the German universities in the second decade of the nine- 
teenth century, which were intended for the professional training of German uni- 
versity students for teaching in the German secondary schools. (See footnote i, 
page 57$.i 



Nb.W/ l\bWUh.P^L:ilib AND t.Xt'ANhiUN^ «25 



was almost entirely in academic subjects, with some talks on 
school-keeping and class organization and management added, 
and at times a little philosophy as to educational work, such as 
habit-formation, morality, thinking, and the training of the will. 
Educational journalism did not begin in either Europe or America 
until near the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 
and it was 1850 before it attained any significance, and 1840 to 
1850 before any important pedagogical literature arose. ^ 

New influences. In 1843 there appeared, in Germany, the 
first two volumes of a very celebrated and influential History of 
Education, by a professor of miner- 
alogy in the University of Erlangen, by 
the name of Karl Georg von Raumer. 
As a young man in Paris (1808-09), 
studying the great mineral collections 
found there, he read and was deeply 
stirred by Fichte's "Address to the 
German Nation" (p. 567), As a re- 
sult he went to Yverdon, in 1809, and 
spent some months in studying the 
work in Pestalozzi's Institute. This 
interest in education he never lost, 
and thereafter, as professor of miner- 
alogy at Halle and Erlangen, he also 
gave lectures on pedagogy {Uber Pdda- 
gogik). The outgrowth of these lec- 
tures was his four- volume History of Pedagogy from the Revival 
of Classical Studies to our own Time} The work was done 
v/ith characterisT-ic German thoroughness, and for long served 
as a standard organization and text on the history of the devel- 
opment of educational theory and practice since the days of 
the Revival of Learning. The work of von Raumer stimulated 
many to a study of the writings of the earlier educational re- 

1 When the first teachers' training-school in America was opened at Concord, 
Vermont, by the Reverend Samuel R. Hall, in 1823, it included, besides a three-year 
academy-type academic course, practice teaching in a rural school in winter, and 
some lectures on the " Art of Teaching." Without a professional book to guide him, 
and relying only upon his experience as a teacher, Hall tried to tell his pupils how to 
organize and manage a school. To make clear his ideas he wrote out a series of 
Lectures on Schoolkecpiitg, which some friends induced him to publish. This, the 
first professional book in EngHsh issued in America for teachers, appeared in 1829. 

2 Gesc.iiichte der Pddagogik voni Wiederaufbliihcn klassicher Stiidicn his auf unsere 
Zeit. Vols. I and 11, 1843; vol. in, 1S47; vol. iv, 1855. Much of this was translated 
into other languages. Barnard's American Journal of Education, begun in 1855, 
published a translation of much of von Raumer's work for American readers. 




Fig. 238 

Karl Georg von Raumer 

(1783-1865) 



520 ni;!5lUK.l Ur £!vl_>»UV^/\l IWIN 

formers, and numerous books and papers on educational history 
and theory soon began to appear. Most important, for Ameri- 
can students, was Henry Barnard's monumental American 
Journal of Education, begun in 1855, and contmued for thirty- 
one years. This is a great treasure-house of pedagogical litera- 
ture for American educators. 

After 1850 the organization of a technique of instruction for the 
elementary-school subjects took place rapidly, in the normal 
schools of all lands, as it had earlier in the German teachers' semi- 
naries. By 1868 the study of the new Herbartian psychology and 
educational theory was well under way in Germany, and by 1890 
in the United States. By 1875 the kindergarten, with its new 
theory of child life, was also beginning to make itself felt in both 
Europe and America. Between 1850 and 1875 Weber, Lotze, 
Fechner, and Wundt laid the foundations for a new psychology 
(R' 357)) and in 1878 Wundt opened the first laboratory for the 
experimental study of psychology at the University of Leipzig. 
In 1890 William James published his two- volume work on Prin- 
ciples of Psychology, a book so original and lucid in treatment that 
it at once gave a new teaching organization to modern psychol- 
ogy. After about 1880, the extension of education upward and 
outward in the United States, and the rapid development of state 
school systems which had by that time begun, began to make 
new demands for better scientific and legal and administrative 
organization, and this gave rise to a new type of educational 
literature. 

After von Raumer's work, probably the greatest single stimu- 
lative influence of the mid-nineteenth century was that exerted by 
the marked successes of the Prussian armies in a series of short 
but very decisive wars. Against Denmark (1864) and Austria 
(1866), but in particular in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, 
the Prussian armies proved irresistible. These military opera- 
tions attracted new attention to education, and "the Prussian 
schoolmaster has triumphed" became a common world saying. 
This, coupled with the remarkable national development of 
United Germany which almost immediately set in, caused pro- 
gressive nations to turn to the study of education with increased 
interest. The English and Scottish universities now began to es- 
tablish lectureships in the theory and history of education,^ and 

^ In 1876 S. S. Laurie (1829-1909) was elected to one of the first chairs in educa- 
tion in Great Britain, that of "Professor of the Theory, History, and Practice of 
Education" in the University of Edinburgh- 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 827 

the first university chairs in education in the United States were 
founded. 

The university study of education. In no country in the world 
have the universities, within the past three decades, given the 
attention to the study of Education — a term that in EngUsh- 
speaking lands has replaced the earlier and more limited "Peda- 
gogy" — ^that has been given in the United States.^ After the 
United States the newer universities of England probably come 
next. Up to 1890 less than a dozen chairs of education had been 
established in all the colleges of the United States, and their work 
was still largely limited to historical and philosophical studies of 
education, and to a type of classroom methodology and school 
management, since almost entirely passed over to the normal 
schools. By 1930 there were some six hundred colleges in the 
United States giving serious courses on educational history and 
procedure and administration, many of them maintaining large 
and important professional Schools of Education for the more 
scientific study of the subject, and for the training of leaders 
for the service of the nation's schools. 

In the great advances which have taken place in the organiza- 
tion of education, during these three decades, no institution in the 
world has exerted a more important influence than has "Teachers 
College," Columbia University, in the City of New York, which 
was organized in 1887 as "The New York College for the Training 
of Teachers," but since 1890 has been afiiliated with Columbia 
University, under its present name. This institution has been a 
model copied by many others over the world ; has trained a large 
percentage of the leaders in education in the United States; and 
has been particularly influential with students from England, the 
English self-governing dominions, China, and South America. 

To-day, in all the state universities and in many non-state in- 
stitutions in the United States, we find well -organized Teachers' 
Colleges engaged in a work which two decades ago was being at- 

^ Probably the first lectures on Pedagogy given in any American college were 
given in 1832, in what is now New York University. From 1850 to 1855 the city 
superintendent of schools of Providence, Rhode Island, was Professor of Didactics, 
in BrowTi University. In i860 a course of lectures on the "Philosophy of Educa- 
tion, School Economy, and the Teaching Art" was given to the seniors of the Uni- 
versity of Michigan. In 1873 ^ Professorship of Philosophy and Education was es- 
tablished in the University of Iowa. This was the first permanent chair created 
in America. In 1870 a Department of the Science and Art of Teaching was created 
at the University of Michigan. In 1881 a Department of Pedagogy was created at 
the University of Wisconsin, and in 1884 similar departments at the University of 
North Carolina and at Johns Hopkins University. "^ 



J_-/J_-^ \y V-'X i X X v^x ^ 



tempted by but a few institutions anywhere. In the municipal 
universities of England, in Canada, in Japan and China, and in 
other democratic lands, we find the beginnings of a similar devel- 
opment of the scientific study of education. In these Schools or 
Colleges for the scientific study of education the best thinking on 
the problems of the reorganization and administration of educa- 
tion, and the most new and creative work, has been and is being 
done.^ 

The problems of the present. Pestalozzi dreamed that he 
might be able to psychologize instruction and reduce all to an 
orderly procedure, which, once learned, would make one a master 
teacher. What he was not able to accomplish he died thinking 
others after him would do. The problem of education has had, 
with time, no such simple and easy solution. Instead, with the 
development of state school systems, the extension of education 
in many new directions to meet new needs, and the application to 
the study of education of the same scientific methods which have 
produced such results in other fields of human knowledge, we 
have come to-day to have hundreds of problems, many of which 
are complex and difficult and which influence deeply the welfare 
of society and the State. That these problems, even with time, 
will receive any such simple solution as that of which Pestalozzi 
dreamed, may well be doubted. In the days of church control, 
memoriter instruction, and a school for religious ends, education 
was a simple matter; to-day it partakes of the difficulty and com- 
plexity which characterize most of the problems of modern world 
States. In consequence of this important change in the character 
of education a great number of important problems in educational 
organization, practice, and procedure now face us for solution. 

Space can here be taken to mention only the more prominent of 
these present-day educational problems. On the administrative 
side is a v/hole group of problems relating to forms of organiza- 
tion: the proper educational relationships between the State and 
its subordinate units; the development of a state educational 
policy: the types of instruction the State must provide, and com- 
pel attendance upon; questions of taxation and support, compul- 
sory attendance, and child labor; the training and oversight of 
teachers for the service of the State; problems of child health and 
welfare; the provision of adequate and professional supervision; 

1 In education, as in other lines of work, the statement of Richard H. Quick that 
the distinctive function of a university is not action, but thought, has been exempli- 
tied. 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 829 

the provision of continuation schools, and of industrial and voca- 
tional training; the supervision of school buildings for health and 
sanitary control; and the relation of the State to private and 
parochial education. The problem of how to produce as effective 
and as thorough education for leadership with a one-class school 
system as with a two-class; the opening-up of opportunity for 
youth of brains in any social class to rise and be trained for serv- 
ice; the selection and proper training of those of superior intelh- 
gence; the elimination of barriers to the advancement of children 
of large intellectual endowment; and what best to do with those 
of small intellectual capacity, form another important group of 
present-day educational problems. Vocational training and 
technical education, and the relation and the proper solution of 
these questions to national happiness and prosperity and human 
welfare, form still another important group. The many ques- 
tions which hinge upon instruction; the elimination of useless sub- 
ject-matter; the best organization of instruction; proper aims and 
ends; moral and civic training; the most economical organization 
of school work ; the saving of time ; and what are desirable educa- 
tional reorganizations, all these form a group of instructional 
problems of large significance for the future of public education. 
Still more in detail, but of large importance, are the questions re- 
lating to the scientific measurement of the results of instruction; 
the erection of attainable goals in teaching; and the introduction 
of scientific accuracy into educational work. Still another im- 
portant group of problems relates to the readjustment of inherited 
school organization and practices, the better to meet the changed 
and changing conditions of national life - social, industrial, po- 
litical, religious, economic, scientific — brought about by the in- 
dustrirJ and social and scientific and political revolutions which 
have taken place. 

These represent some of the more important new problems in 
education which have come to challenge us since the school was 
taken over from the Church and transformed into the great con 
structive tool of the State. Their solution will call for careful in- 
vestigation, experimentation, and much clear thinking, and be- 
fore they are solved other new problems will arise. So probably 
it will ever be under a democratic form of government; only in 
autocratic or strongly monarchical forms of government, where 
the study of problems of educational organization and adjust- 
ment are not looked upon with favor, can a school system to-day 



830 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

remain for long fixed in type or uniform in character. Education 
to-day has become intricate and difficult, requiring careful pro- 
fessional training on the part of those who would exercise intelli- 
gent control, and so intimately connected with national strength 
and national welfare that it may be truthfully said to have be- 
come, in many respects, the most important constructive under- 
taking of a modern State. 



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 

1. Show that education must be extended and increased in efficiency in 
proportion as the suffrage is extended, and additional political functions 
given to the electorate. Illustrate. 

2. Trace the changes in the character of the instruction given in the schools, 
paralleling such changes. 

3. Explain the difference in use of the schools for nationality ends in Ger- 
many and France. 

4. Of what is the recent development of evening, adult, and extension edu- 
cation an index? 

5. Show why university education is more important in national life to-day 
than ever before in history. 

6. Compare the rate of development of universities during the nineteenth 
century, and all time before the nineteenth. Of what is the difference in 
rate an index? 

7. Explain why Americans have been less successful in introducing science 
instruction into their schools than have the Germans. Agriculture than 
the French. 

8. Explain the breakdown of the old apprenticeship education. 

9. Explain the American recent rapid acceptance of the agricultural high 
school, whereas the agricultural colleges for a long time faced opposition 
and lack of interest and support. 

10. Explain the continued emphasis of high-school studies leading to the pro- 
fessions rather than the vocations, though so small a percentage of peo- 
ple are needed for pr"*"essional work. 

11. In Germany this was largely regulated by the Government; show how it 
would be much easier there than in the United States. 

12. Show why European nations would naturally take up vocational training 
ahead of the United States, Canada, Australia, or South America. 

13. Explain the reasons for the new conceptions as to the value of childlife 
which have come within the past hundred years, in all advanced nations. 
Why not in the less advanced nations? 

14. Show the relation between the breakdown of the apprentice system, the 
Industrial Revolution, and the rise of compulsory school attendance. 

15. Show that compulsory school attendance is a natural corollary to general 
taxation for education. 

16. How do you account for the relatively recent interest in the education of 
defectives and delinquents? Of what is this interest an expression? 

i"]. Does the obligation assumed to educate involve any greater exercise of 
state authority or recognition of duty than the advancement of the 
health of the people and the sanitary welfare of the State? 

18. What additional unsolved problems would you add to the list givec 
on the preceding page? 



NEW TENDENCIES AND EXPANSIONS 831 

SELECTED READINGS 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections illustrative 
of the contents of this chapter are reproduced: 

367. McKechnie, W. S.: The Environmental Influence of the State. 

368. Emperor William II.: German Secondary Schools and National 

Ends. 

369. Van Hise, Chas. R. : The University and the State. 

370. Friend: What the Folk High Schools have done for Denmark. 

371. U.S. Commission: The German System of Vocational Education. 

372. U.S. Commission: Vocational Education and National Prosperity. 

373. de Montmorency: English Conditions before the First Factory-Labor 

Act. 

374. Giddings, F. R.: The New Problem of Child Labor. 

375. Hoag, E. B., and Terman, L. M.: Health Work in the Schorl;?, 



QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS 

1. Explain why it is now so important that the State properly environ (367) 
its youth. 

2. What were the actuating motives behind the German Emperor's speech 
(368)? Was he right in his position as to the relation of the schools and 
national needs and welfare? 

3. Explain Van Hise's conception (369) that the university is "The Soul of 
the State." 

4. Does Denmark form any exception as to what might be done (370) in 
any country, such as Russia? Mexico? 

5. Show that the results justified the German emphasis (371) on vocational 
training. How do you explain this German far-sightedness? 

6. What will be the result when many nations (372) become highly skilled? 

7. Show the growth of humanitarian influences by contrasting conditions in 
England in 1802 (373), and conditions to-day. 

8. Would the English 1802 conditions be found in anv Christian land to- 
day? Why? 

9. Show that the child-labor problem (374) is a product of the Industrial 
Revolution. 

10. Viewed in the light of history, what would we say of the present opposi- 
tion to health work (375) in the schools? 



SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES 

*Allen, E. A. "Education of Defectives"; in Butler, N. M., Education in 
the United States, pp. 771-820. 
Barnard, Henry. National Education in Europe. 

^Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education, Report, vol. I. 
(Document 1004, H. R., 63d Congress, 2d session, Washington, 1914.) 
Cook, W. A. "A Brief Survey of the Development of Compulsory Edu- 
cation in the United States"; in Elementary School Teacher, vol. 12, 
pp. 331-35. (March, 191 2.) 
*Dean, A. D. The Worker and the State. 
Eliot, C. W. Education for Efficiency. 
Farrington, F. E. Commercial Education in Germany. 
Foght, H. W. Rural Denmark and its Schools. 



832 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

Friend, L. L. The Folk High Schools of Denmark. (Bulletin No. 3, 1914, 
United States Bureau of Education.) 
*Hoag, E. B., and Terman, L. M. Health Work in the Schools. 
Kandel, I. L. "The Junior High School in European Systems"; in Edu- 
cational Review, vol. 58, pp. 305-29. (Nov. 1919.) 
*Munroe, J. P. New Demands in Education. 
*Payne, G. H. The Child in Human Progress. 
Smith, A. T., and Jesien, W. S. Higher Technical Education in Foreign 
Countries. (Bulletin No. n, 1917, United States Bureau of Educa- 
tion.) 
Snedden, D. S. Vocational Education. 
*Terman, L. M. The Intelligence of School Children. 
Waddle, C. W. Introduction to Child Psychology, chap. I. 
Ware, Fabian. Educational Foundations of Trade and Industry. 



CONCLUSION; THE FUTURE 

We have now reached the end of the story of the rise and progress 
of man's conscious effort to improve himself and advance the wel- 
fare of his group by means of education. To one who has fol- 
lowed the narrative thus far it must be evident how fully this con- 
scious effort has paralleled the history of the rise and progress of 
western civilization itself. Beginning first among the Greeks — 
the first people in history to be ''smitten with the passion for 
truth," the first possessing sufficient courage to put faith in rea- 
son, and the first to attempt to reconcile the claims of the State 
and the individual and to work out a plan of ''ordered liberty" — ■ 
a new spirit was born and in time passed on to the western world. 
As Butcher well says (R. ii), "the Greek genius is the European 
genius in its first and brightest bloom, and from a vivifying con- 
tact with the Greek spirit Europe derived that new and mighty 
impulse which we call Progress." Hellenizing first the Eastern 
Mediterranean, and then taking captive her rude conqueror, the 
Hellenization of the Roman and early Christian world was the 
result. 

Then followed the reaction under early Christian rule, and the 
fearful deluge of barbarism which for centuries well-nigh extin- 
guished both the ancient learning and the new spirit. Finally, 
after the long mediaeval night, came "time's burst of dawn," first 
and for a long time confined to Italy, but later extending to all 
northern lands, and in the century of revival and rediscovery and 
reconstruction the Greek passion for truth and the Greek courage 
to trust reason were reawakened, and once more made the heri- 
tage of the western world. Once again the Greek spirit, the spirit 
of freedom and progress and trust in the power of truth, became 
the impulse that was to guide and dominate the future. To fol- 
low reason without fear of consequences, to substitute scientific 
for empirical knowledge, to equip men for intelligent participa- 
tion in civic life, to discover a rational basis for conduct, to unfold 
and expand every inborn faculty and energy, and to fill man with 
a restless striving after an ideal — these essentially Greek charac- 
teristics in time came to be accepted by an increasing number of 
modern men, as they had been by the thoughtful men of the an- 
cient Greek world, as the law and goal of human endeavor. From 



834 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

this point on the intellectual progress of the western world was 
certain, though at times the rate seems painfully slow. 

The great events which stand out in niodern history — mile- 
stones, as it were, along the road of the intellectual progress of 
mankind in the recovery of the Greek spirit — were the revival 
of the ancient learning, the Protestant appeal to reason, the re- 
covery and vast extension of the old scientific knowledge, the as- 
sertion of the rights of the individual as opposed to the rights of 
the State, and the growth of a new humanitarianism, induced by 
the teachings of Christianity, which has softened old laws and 
awakened a new conception of the value of child and human life. 
Out of these great historic movements have come modern schol- 
arship, the inestimable boon of religious liberty, the firm estab- 
lishment of the idea of the reign of law in an orderly universe, the 
conception of government as in the interests of the governed, the 
substitution of democracy and political equality for the rule of a 
class or an autocratic power, and the assertion of the right to an 
education at public expense as a birthright of every child. The 
common school, the education of all, equality of rights and op- 
portunity, full and equal suffrage, the responsibility of all for the 
advancement of the common welfare, and liberty under law have 
been the natural consequences and the outcome of these great 
struggles to set free and quicken the human spirit. 

The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which marked the close of a 
century of effort to crush human reason and religious liberty with 
violence and oppression, marked a turning-point in the history of 
the world. Though religious intolerance and bigotry might still 
persist in places for centuries to come, this Peace acknowledged 
the futility of persecution to stamp out human inquiry, and 
marked the downfall of intellectual mediaevalism. The work of 
the political philosophers of the eighteenth century, the estab- 
lishment of a new political ideal by the leaders of the American 
Revolution, and the drastic sweeping-away of ancient abuses in 
Church and State in the Revolution in France, applied a new 
Spirit to government, ushered in the rule of the common man, and 
began the establishment of democracy as the ruHng form of gov- 
ernment for mankind. The recent World War in Europe was in a 
sense a sequel to what had gone before. One result of its out- 
come, despite certain reactionary but temporary old-type gov- 
ernments that the near future may see set up in places, has been 
the elimination of the mediceval theory of the "divine right of 



CONCLUSION; THE FUTURE 



835 




Fig. 239. The Established aisto Experimental Nations of Europe 

The established nations are in white; the experimental nations shaded. After a 
time Germany should become white also. 



kings"' from the continent of Europe, and the estabhshment of 
the democratic type of government as the ruHng t}^e of the fu- 
ture. Some of the nations for a time will be in a sense experi- 
mental, as shown on the above map, and even well-governed Ger- 
many must learn new forms and ways, but in time government of 
and by and for the people is practically certain to become estab- 
lished ever3avhere on the continent of Europe. 

Still more, the outcome of the World War would seem to indi- 
cate that democratic forms of government are destined in time to 
extend to peoples everywhere who have the capacity for using 
them. The great problem of the coming century, then, and per- 
haps even of succeeding centuries, will be to make democracy a 
safe form of government for the world. This can be done only by 
a far more general extension of educational opportunities and ad- 
vantages than the world has as yet witnessed. In the hands of an 
uneducated proletariat democracy is a dangerous instrument. In 
Russia, Mexico, and in certain of the Central American Republics 



836 HISTORY OF EDUCATION 

we see what a democracy results in in the hands of an uneducated 
people. There, too often, the revolver instead of the ballot box is 
used to settle public issues, and instead of orderly government 
under law we have a reign of injustice and anarchy. Only by the 
slow but sure means of general education of the masses in charac- 
ter and in the fundamental bases of liberty under law can govern 
ments that are safe and intelligent be created. In a far largi^r 
sense than anything we have as yet witnessed, educatioii must be- 
come the constructive tool for national progress. 

The great needs of the modern world call for the general diffu- 
sion among the masses of mankind of the intellectual and spiritual 
and political gains of the centuries, which are as yet, despite the 
great recent progress made in extending general education, the 
possession of but a relatively small number of the world's popula- 
tion. Among the more important of these are the religious spirit, 
coupled with full religious liberty and tolerance; a clear recogni- 
tion of the rights of minorities, so long as they do not impair the 
advancement of the general welfare; the general diffusion of a 
knowledge of the more common truths and applications of science, 
particularly as these relate to personal hygiene, sanitation, agri- 
culture, and modern industrial processes; the general education of 
all, not only in the tools of knowledge, but in those fundamental 
principles of self-government which lie at the basis of democratic 
life; training in character, self-control, and in the ability to as- 
sume and carry responsibility; the instilling into a constantly 
widening circle of mankind the importance of fidelity to duty, 
truth, honor, and virtue; the emphasis of the many duties and re- 
sponsibilities which encompass all in the complex modern world, 
rather than the eighteenth-century individualistic conception of 
political and personal rights ; the clear distinction between liberty 
and license ; and the conception of liberty guided by law. In addi- 
tion each man and woman should be educated for personal effi- 
ciency in some vocation or form of service in which each can best 
realize his personal possibilities, and at the same time render the 
largest service to that society of which he forms a part. 

The great needs of the modern world also call for that form of 
education and training which will not merely impart literacy and 
prepare for economic competence and national citizenship, but 
which will give to national groups a new conception of national 
character and international morality and create new standards 
of value for human effort. National character and international 



CONCLUSION; THE FUTURE 837 

morality are always the outgrowth of the personality of a people, 
and this in turn calls for the inculcation of humane ideals, the 
proper discipKne of the instincts, the training of a will to do right, 
good physical vigor, and, to a large degree, the development of 
individual efficiency and economic competence. Moral and reli- 
gious instruction, as it has been given, will not suffice, because it 
does not reach the heart of the problem. No nation has shown 
more completely the utter futility of religious instruction to pro- 
duce morality than has Germany, where the instruction of all in 
the principles of religion has been required for centuries. 

The problem of the twentieth century, then, and probably of 
other centuries to come, is how the constructive forces in modern 
society, of which the schools of nations should stand first, can 
best direct their efforts to influence and direct the deeper sources 
of the life of a people, so that the national characteristics it is 
desired to display to the world will be developed because the 
schools have instilled into every child these national ideals. Many 
forces must cooperate in such a task, but unless the schools of 
nations become clearly conscious of national needs and of inter- 
national purposes, become inspired by an ideal of service for the 
welfare of mankind, substitute among national groups competi- 
tion in the things of the spirit — art, architecture, music, sports, 
education, letters, sanitation, housing, public works, and such 
applications of science as minister to health and happiness — for 
competition in the creation of material wealth, the piling-up of 
armaments, the extension of national boundaries, and the present 
overemphasis of a narrow nationalism, and direct the energies of 
coming generations to the carrying-out of this new and larger 
human service, nations must inevitably fail to reach the world 
position they might otherwise have occupied, destructive inter- 
national competition and warfare will continue, and the advance- 
ment of world civilization and international well-being will be 
greatly retarded thereby. 

In this work of advancing world civilization, the nations which 
have long been in the forefront of progress must expect to assume 
important roles. It is their peculiar mission — for long clearly 
recognized by Great Britain and France in their political rela- 
tions with inferior and backward peoples; by the United States in 
its excellent work in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines; and 
clearly formulated in the system of "mandatories" under the 
League of Nations — to help backward peoples to advance, and 



838 



HISTORY OF EDUCATION 




to assist them in lifting themselves to a higher plane of world civi- 
lization. In doing this a very practical type of education must 
naturally play the leading part, and time, probably much time, 
will be required to achieve any large results. Disregarding the 



CONCLUSION; THE FUTURE 839 

large need for such service among the leading world nations, the 
map reproduced on the opposite page reveals how much of such 
work still remains to be done in the world as a whole. "The 
White Man's Burden" truly is large, and the larger world tasks 
of the twentieth century for the more advanced nations will be to 
help other peoples, in distant and more backward lands, slowly 
to educate themselves in the difficult art of self-government, 
gradually establish stable and democratic governments of their 
own, and in time to take their places among the enlightened and 
responsible peoples of the earth. 

At the bottom of all this work and service lie the new human- 
liberty conceptions first worked out and formulated for the world 
by little Greece. In time the ideas to which they gave expression 
have become the heritage of what we know as our western civiliza- 
tion, and the warp and woof of the intellectual and political life of 
the modern world. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, and 
of the new political and commercial and social forces of our time, 
this western civilization, using education as its great constructive 
tool, is now spreading to every continent on the globe. The task 
oi succeeding centuries will be to carry forward and extend what 
has been so well begun; to level up the peoples of the earth, 
as far as inherent differences in capacity will permit; and to ex- 
tend, through educative influences, the principles and practices of 
a Christian civilization to all. In establishing intelligent and in- 
terested government, and in moulding and shaping the destinies 
of peoples, general education has become the great constructive 
tool of modern civilization. A hundred and fifty years ago edu- 
cation was of but little importance, being primarily an instrument 
of the Church and used for church ends. To-day general educa- 
tion is an instrument of government, and is rightfully regarded 
as a prime essential to good government and national progress. 
With the spread of the democratic type the importance of the 
school is enhanced, its control by the State becomes essential, its 
continued expansion to include new types of schools and new 
forms of educational opportunities and service a necessity, the 
study of its organization and administration and problems be- 
comes a necessary function of government, while the training 
it can give is dignified and made the birthright of every boy 
and girl. 



INDEX 



Abelard, 188-90, 196. 

Academic des Armes, 404. 

Academy, the, 44, 272; at Venice, 250, 265; 
in Europe and America, 400, 418, 463, 524, 
696-99* 

Act, Five-Mile, 324; Roman Catholic relief, 
490; of Conformity, 324, 400; of Suprem- 
acy, 298,321,358. 

Adams, John, 526. 

Adelhard, 185. 

Ad visor J' Order of 1717, 555. 

Africa, education in South, 717. 

Agricola, 254, 271, 389. 

Agriculture,'' beginnings of instruction in, 
546; science applied to, 800; first schools 
of, 801; a world movement, 802. 

Agricultural Institute of Fellenberg, 546. 

Albany, educational beginnings in, 662. 

Albertus Magnus, 191. 

Alcuin, 140, 163. 

Aldus press, 250, 257. 

Alexandria, importance of, in history, 47-49. 

Alexandrian learning, 48, 381. 

Alfred, King, 145-47. 

Algebra, study of, begun, 280, 392. 

Algemeine Landrecht, the, 565. 

Algiers, education in, 741, 787. 

Alhazen, 185. 

Alphabet, origins of, 77. 

Altenstein, Baron von, 581. 

America, battles for schools in, 676; begins 
constitutional government, 494; colonial 
colleges in, 703; contributions to world 
history, 496; educational ladder evolved, 
708; effect of Revolutionary War on 
schools, 654; Protestant settlement of, 356. 

Anglican educational foundations, 319-26. 

Anselm, 187. 

Antoninus, St., 264. 

Apprenticeship) education, 210, 452; break- 
down of, 734. 

Aquinas, Thomas, 19J, 227. 

Argentine, The, education in, 717; school 
system of, 718. 

Aristotle, 42, 197, 225, 390; translations of, 
185, 226. 

Arithmetic, Gerbert's, 160; in Greece, 27; 
in Middle Ages, 160, 280; in Rome, 65; 
in Seven Liberal Arts, 158; first modern 
texts in, 444. 

Arnaul de Marviel, 243. 

Arnold, Matthew, on Guizot, 599; on Na- 
poleon, 604. 

^^tronomy, in Seven Liberal Arts, 160, 280. 



Athenian education, the new, 39-50; the old, 

23-37- 
Athens, university of, 45. 

Attica, ancient, 17-20. 

Augustine, St., 96, 138, 198. 
Austria, education in, 715, 716. 
Austrian reformers, 475. 
Austrian School Code of 1774, 562. 
Averroes, 185. 
Avicenna, 185, 198, 226. 

Baccalaureus, in a mediaeval university 

222. 
Bache, Alexander D., 752. 
Bacon, Sir Francis, 390, 394, 405, 423. 
Bacon, Roger, 227. 
Bacteria, isolation of, 726. 
Bagdad, Mohammedan learning at, 182. 
Baines, Edward, on education, 641 . 
Balfour Annexation Law of 1912, 645. 
Baltimore, educational beginnings in, 661. 
Banking, revival of, 207. 
Barbarian migrations, 109-23. 
Barbarian tribes accept Chnstianity, iiS- 

21. 
Barnard, Henry, 690, 753. 
Basedow, J. B., 534-38. 
Battles for education in U.S., 676. 
Bade, Venerable, 139. 
Bell, Andrew, 622-24. 
Benedict, St., 99, 128. 
Benedictines, 100, 128. 
Berlin, University of, 574-77. 
Bible, translation of, into English, 289, zgo 

into French, 289; into German, 310. 
Bills of Rights, 498. 
Binet, Alfred, 821. 
Blind, education of, 819. 
Blow, Susan, 766. 
Boccaccio, 245. 
Boethius, 163. 

Bologna, law developed at, 192-97, 225. 
Boston, first high school at, 699. 
Boston Latin School, 361. 
Brahe, Tycho, 387, 394. 
Braidwood, Thomas, 819. 
Brazil, education in, 717, 719. 
Brethren of the Common Life, 271. 
Britain, introduction of Christianity into, 

119, 138; early learning in, 138". 
British and Foreign School Society, 625. 
British Museum founded, 492. 
Brothers of the Christian Schools, 347-51, 

51S, 590, 596. 



842 



INDEX 



Brougham, Lord, 625^31, 633, 636. 
Budaeus, Guillaume, 268. 
Billow, Baroness, 765. 
Bunyan, John, 491. 
Burgher class, rise of, 207. 
Burgher school, 418, 419, 599. 

Cadet years, in ancient Greece, 34. 

Caesar de Bus, 346. 

Cahiers of 1789, 512. 

Calvin, Jolin, 298, 330. 

Calvinists, educational work of, 330-35. 

Cambridge, and science study, 423. 

Cambridge university, founding of, 218. 

Campe, J. H., 538 f. 

Campion, teaching of, 283. 

Canada, education in, 716. 

Canon Law organized, 196. 

Capella, Martianus, 163. 

Carter, James G., 700, 702, 

Cassian, 99, 128. 

Cassio'dorus, 163. 

Catechetical schools, 93. 

Catecliism, 311, 430, 437, 442. 

Catechumenal instruction, 92. 

Cathedral school?, 97, 152, 188. 

Cathedral school at Paris, 189. 

Cathedral school at York, 139. 

Catherine II of Russia, 477, 511, 715. 

Cato the Elder, 63. 

Cavour, Count of, 609. 

Caxton, work of, 256. 

Certificates, first teachers', 176. 

Cessatio, in mediaeval universities, 221. 

Chalcondyles, Demetrius, 248. 

Chalotais, Rene de la, 509. 

Chancellor, in the university, 224. 

Chantry schools, 152. 

Charity school, religious, 449, 615; in New 
Jersey, 682; in Pennsylvania, 680. 

Charlemagne, his work, 140-45; his procla- 
mations, 142-44. 

Chemical laboratory, the first, 724. 

Chemistry, beginnings of modern, 724. 

Childhood, care of, 457, 630. 

Child Labor, 738, 813-15. 

Chili, education in, 718. 

China, educational system of, 721, 789. 

Chivalric commandments, 169. 

Chivalric education, 164-69. 

Chivalric ideals, 168. 

Christianity, challenge of, 87; contribution 
of, 82-100; influence of, on barbarians, 
118, 121; rejects pagan learning, 94, 282, 
429; where arose, 84. 

Chrysoloras, Manuel, 247. 

Church and elementary education, 344-51; 
early organization of, 95; work of, in Mid- 
dle Ages, 121. 

Cicero, Petrarch discovers work of, 244, 265. 

Ciceronian style, 274, 283, 398. 



Cities, development of, in U.S., 667; new 
problems arising in, 668. 

Citizen-cadet, in Ancient Greece, 34. 

City class, rise of, 204. 

City life, revival of, 202. 

City school societies in U.S., 660. 

Clinton, De Witt, 660, 671, 751. 

Colet, John, 254, 274, 275, 288. 

College de France, 269. 

Colleges in the U.S., 657; by i860, 704; by 
1900, 705; colonial, 703. 

Comenius, John Amos, 408-16. 

Commerce, revival of, 205. 

Communal colleges of France, 595. 

Compulsory school attendance, 815-17; in 
England, 644; in German lands, 552, 815; 
in U.S., 816. 

Concordat of Napoleon, 590. 

Condorcet, 514, 516, 597. 

Conic sections, 392. 

Connecticut, Bernard in, 690; Law of 1650, 
366. 

Conservation of energy, 725. 

Constance, Council of, 291. 

Constan^ine accepts Christianity, 91. 

Constantine, of Carthage, 199, 216. 

Constituent Assembly of France, 512. 

Constitutional government begins, in Amer- 
ica, 494, 499, 522; in France, 500; in other 
lands, 503. 

Convention, National, of France, 515-18. 

Convents, and their schools, 137, 150, 346 

Coote, Edmund, 443. 

Copernicus, Nicholas, 386. 

Council of Constance, 291. 

Council of Trent, 303, 336. 

Counting-board, Greek, 27; Roman, 65. 

Court schools of Italy, 265-68. 

Cousin, Victor, 597, 751. 

Crippled children, education of, 821. 

Crusade movement, 199-202. 

Cuba, education in, 740, 789. 

Curriculum, evolution of, elementary, 756, 
780; grading of instruction in, 756; secon- 
dary, 281. 

Cygnaeus, Uno, 769. 

Dalton, 724. 

Dame School, in England, 447; in U.S., 665 

Dante, 242. 

Dartmouth College decision, 706. 

Darwin, Charles, 726. 

Deaf, education of, 819. 

Defectives, education of, 818-21. 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 491. 

De Garmo, Charles, 722 f. 

Demia, Father, 745. 

Democracy, spread of idea, 503, 504. 

Denmark, educational system of, 713. 

Descartes, Rene, 394, 423. 

Dewey, John, 780-83. 



INDEX 



843 



Dialectic, in Seven Liberal Arts, 158; super- 
sedes Grammar, 190, 280. 

Diderot, 477, 482, 511. 

Diesterweg, 570, 582. 

Dilworth, Thos., 443, 444. 

Directory, the, in France, 518. 

Discipline, school, 455; by a Swabian school- 
master, 455. 

Disease, modern theory of, 383. 

Dissenters allowed to establish schools, 438, 
459- 

Dominicans, 191 f. 

Donatus, 156. 

Dutch, early education among, 333-35. 

Education a national tool, 739; problems of, 
in the future, 838; present, 828-30; scien- 
tific organization of, 824-30. 

Educational societies, in England, 632; in 
U.S., 659. 

Egypt, education in, 741. 

Eighteenth century, importance of, 471-72. 

Elementarwerk of Basedow, 535. 

Elementary school curriculum, evolution of, 
756. 

Elyot, Sir Thomas, 275. 

Encyclopedia, first modern, 492. 

Engine, steam, 493. 

England, Annexation Law of 1902, 645; 
Department of Science and Art created, 
776; early Christian learning in, 138; edu- 
cational system evolved, 649; Fisher Edu- 
cation Act of 1918, 649; 'progress since 
1870, 645-50; pupil-teacher system in, 
753; Reform Bill of 1832, 637; of 1867, 
642; secondary education included in the 
national system, 646; teacher training in, 
627, 753- 

English Bible, 289, 321. 

English eighteenth-century educational ef- 
forts, 614. 

English grammar schools, 277, 278. 

EngHsh Law of 1833, 638. 

English Law of 1870, 642. 

Enghsh Hberty, beginnings of, 486. 

Enghsh parhamentary battle for schools, 
633-44. 

English period of philanthropic effort, 622- 
33- 

English Prayer Book, 321. 

£p6e, Abbe de 1', 819. 

Ephebic oath, the, 35. 

Ephebic years, in ancient Greece, 35. 

Episcopal schools, 97. 

Erasmus, 274, 281, 288, 398. 

Ernest, Duke, educational work of, 317, 417. 

Euclid, translations of, 185, 186, 392. 

Europe, illiteracy in, in 1900, 714. 

faculties, in a mediaeval university, 223-25; 
in a modern university, 422. 



Farraday, 724. 

Fechner, 826. 

Feeble-minded, education of, 820. 

Fellenberg and his Institutions, 546, 800. 

Female academies founded, 698. 

Feudalism, 164. 

Fichte, J. G., 545, 567, 574. 

Finland, education in, 297, 713; manual 
training in, 769. 

Five-Mile Act, the, 324. 

Florence, Mediceart Library at, 251; revival 
of banking at, 207; revival of study of 
Greek at, 248. 

Fourcroy, Count de, 590. 

Fourier, Peter, 346. 

France, creation of primary education in, 
596-600; educational organization under 
Napoleon, 590-96; eighteenth-century 
conditions in, 478; higher schools created 
by Napoleon, 593; Law of 1791, 512; 
Law of 1793, 515; Law of 1795,517; Law 
of 1802, 590-92; Law of 1833, 597; Law 
of 1850, 601 ; progress since 1870,602; re- 
duction of illiteracy in, 602; revolution in 
thinking, in i8th century, 484; revolu- 
tionary pedagogy of, 508-19; school sys- 
tem created, 598; special revolutionary 
foundations, 518; University of, created, 
593. 

Franciscans, 191 f. 

Francke's Institutions, 418. 

Frederick Barbarossa, 216. 

Frederick the Great, 474, 558-61. 

Frederick William I, 555. 

Frederick William III, 565, 580. 

Frederick William IV, 583. 

Froebel, Fr., 764-68; Dewey's modification 
of educational ideas of, 780-82. 

Galen, 47, 185, 198, 226, 380, 382. 

GaHleo, G., 388. 

Gallaudet, Thos. R., 819. 

Gaza, Theodorus, 248, 267. 

General Land-Schule Reglement, 558. 

Geneva, center of Calvinism, 299. 

Genoa, center of commerce, 206. 

Geographical discovery, revival of, 257. 

Geography, in Seven Liberal Arts, 160, 280. 

Geometry, in Seven Liberal Arts, 160, 280. 

Gerbert, 160, 183. 

Gerhard of Cremona, 185. 

German education, development of. See 

Prussia. 
German educational propaganda abroad, 

741- 
German school organization, early, 312-19, 

552. 
Gesner, Conrad, 390. 
Gesner, J. M., 555. 
Gesner, Rector, 420. 
Gilbert, William, 389. 



844 



INDEX 



Ginnasio, of Italy, 609. 

Girls, education of, in early Church, 100. 

Gladstone and Law of 1870, 642. 

Gotha, Duke Ernest's work in, 317, 417. 

Gottingen, university of, 423. 

Grading of school instruction, 756-59. 

Grammar, at Rome, 67; in Seven Liberal 

Arts, 15s, 279, 280. 
Grammar schools, English, 277, 353, 461; 

founded after the Reformation, 321-24. 
Grammatist, school of, 26. 
Gratian organizes Canon Law, 196, 226. 
Greece, early education in, 21 ; golden age of, 

39; land and government of, 15; our debt 

to, 50, loi. 
Greek at Cambridge, 274, 289. 
Greek Church, divides off, 103; in education 

in East, 715. 
Greek conquest of Eastern Mediterranean, 

46. 
Greek education, the old, 15-37; the new, 

39-50; results under old, 36. 
Greek higher education, spread and influence 

of, 46. 
Greek langutige and learning, preservation 

of, 57- 
Greek learning, in Syria, 180; forgotten, 138, 

247; revival of, 247-49. 
Greek universities, ancient, 47. 
Gregorian calendar, 392. 
Grocyn, William, 253, 274, 288. 
Grote, Gerhard, 271. 
Guarino da Verona, 266. 
Guilds of Middle Ages, 209; university de- 
grees in, 221. 
Guizot, M., 598-600. 
Gulliver's Travels, 491. 
Gundling, at Halle, 554. 
Gymnasia, German, 316, 353, 418, 554, 558; 

reorganized, 572, 574, 577. 
Gymnasial training in Ancient Greece, 32. 
Gymnasium, ancient Greek, 33, 272; 

Sturm's, 273. 
Gymnastics in Greek education, 31, 41. 

Halle, University of, 423, 553-55. 

Hamilton, Alexander, 660. 

Hanseatic League, 208. 

Hardenburg, 567. 

Haroun-al-Raschid, 182. 

Harris, William T., 766. 

Harvard College, early history of, 367, 657, 

702, 703 ; founding of, 363 ; Greek brought 

to, 254. 
Harvey, William, 389, 394. 
Health, new interest in, 822. 
Health supervision, 823. 
Hebrew, revival of study of, 254, 269. 
Hebrews, early, 84. 
Hecker, Julius, 421, 558, 562. 
Hedge schools, 451. 



Hegius, 271, 289. 

Heidelberg, University of, founding 01, :st6, 
220; center of humanistic learning, 254, 
270. 

Hellinization of Eastern Mediterranean, 46, 
180-83; of Rome, 62. 

Herbart, J. Fr., 759-64; contributions of, 763. 

Herbartian ideas, in Germany, 762; in U.S., 
762. 

Heretic, in Middle Ages, 291. 

Hieronymians, 271. 

High school, in U.S., battle to establish, 095- 
702; first 699; for agriculture, 802; Massa- 
chusetts 'aw of 1827, 700. 

High schools, some early, 700. 

Hippocrates, 185, 197, 226, 380, 389. 

Hoddei^'s Arithmeti€r444# 

Holland, educatiori in, 333, 712. 

Home and Colonial Infant Society, 631, 753. 

Horn Book, 440. 

Huguenots, 299, 301, 356; in education, ;i:i3. 

Humanism, a religious reform movement, 
288; in France, 268; in England, 274; in 
Germany, 269; rise and spread of, 252-54. 

Humanistic course of study, 267. 

Humanistic realism, 397-401 . 

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. work of, in reor- 
ganizing secondary education, 472-74; 
in creating the University of Berlin, 474- 
77- 

Huss, John, 291. 

Huxley, Thomas, 778; his definition of an 
educated man, 779. 

Idiotic, training of, 820. 

Illinois, educational provisions of first con- 
stitution, 671. 

Illiteracy, in Europe by 1900, 714; in France, 
602; in German lands, 583. 

Individual instruction, 454. 

Industrial revolution. 728, 736, 779; effects 
of, on education, 736, 790. 

Industry, revival of, in Middle Ages, 207. 

Infant schools, in England, 630; in France, 
600; in U.S., 664-66. 

Innovators, ideas of, 406. 

Inquisition, the, 384. 

Institutes of France, 515. 

Institutes of Justinian, 195. 

Ireland, learning in early, 138. 

Irnerius of Bologna, 195. 

Isidore of Seville, 163. 

Isocrates, 43. ^ 

Italy, beginnings of modern education in, 
606; decline after the Renaissance, 605: 
modern school system created, 608-12; 
recent educational progress, 610; work of 
Sardinia and Cavour, 609. 

James, William, 826. 
Jansenists, 347. 



jaoan, education in, 719: school system 

created, 720. 
Jay, John, 526, 660. 
Jefferson, Thomas, 525. 
Jerome, St., 99. 
Jesuit colleges, 337. 
Jesuit education, 336-44. 
Jesuit methods, 341. 
Jesuit school organizarfon, 340. 
Jesuit teachers, training of, 342. 
Jesus, his teachings, 86. 
Jesus, Society of, 336^44. 
Jewish faith, early, 85. 
Joseph II, 475. 
Justinian, Institutes of, 195, 226. 

Kalamazoo decision, 701. 

Kant, Immanuel, 534, 537. 

Kepler, Johann, 387, 394. 

Kindergarten idea, 767; contribution of, 
768; Dewey's reorganization of, 781; in 
U.S., 766; origin of, 764; spread of, 765. 

King's College (Columbia), 703. 

Knight, the, 167. 

Knox, John, 335. 

Kriisi, Hermann, 545. 

Lakanal, 516. 

Lancaster, Joseph, 624-27. 

Lancastrian system, in England, 627-30; in 

U.S., 662-64. 
Land grants for education, in U.S., 677. 
Languages, rise of national, 242. 
La Salle, educational work of, 347^1, 745. 
Latin, importance of, in Middle Ages, 282. 
Latin grammar schools, in England, 277, 

321-24, 353, 461, 776; in New England, 

361, 698; in Middle Ages, 307. 
Law, canon, 196, 226. 
Law, evoli-tion of, as a study, 192-97, 226. 
Leaving examinatitons esablished, 564. 
Leeds Mercury on education, 641. 
Lefevre, Jacques, 289. 
Lehrerseminar, 563. 
i-,ehrfreiheit und Lehrnfreiheit, 554. 
Leonard and Gertrude, 539, 542. 
Lepelletier le Saint-Fargeau, 516. 
Libraries, early monastic, 135; university, 

228, 231; first circulating, 492. 
License to teach, first, 176; in Middle Ages, 

222. 
Liceo in Italy, 610. 
Liebig, Justus von, 724. 
Lily's Latin Grammar, 276, 281. 
Linacre, WilUam, 253, 274, 288. 
Lister and antiseptics, 726. 
Literature, in ancient Greek education, 29. 
Living conditions, transformation of, in 

19th century, 729-36. 
Locke, John, 402, 433-37- 
Logarithms, 392. 



Lollards, the, 291. 

Lombard League, the, 194. 

Lombard, Peter the, 171, 191. 

Lotze and modern psychology, S26. 

Loyola, Ignatius, 336. 

Luder, Peter, 254. 

Ludi magister, the, 65. 

Luther, Martin, 270; his Theses, 295; his 

educational ideas, 306, 312-14. 
Lutheran school organization, 312-19. 
Lutheranism, 297, 300. 
Lycees, creation of, under Law of 1802, 591, 

595. 5Q6, 603; instruction in, 601, 775. 
Lyceum, the, 44, 272. 
Lyell, Charles, 725. 
Lyon, Mary, 698. 

Macaulay, Lord, 640. 

Madison, James, 525, 526. 

Magellan, 260. 

Malthus, Rev. F. R., 621. 

Mandeville, Sir John, 258. 

Mann, Horace, on Prussian Teachers' Sem- 
inaries, 570; work in establishing normal 
schools, 752; work in Massachusetts, 689, 
692, 702. 

Manual activities in education, 768-72; con- 
tribution of, 771; origin of instruction in 
769; spread of the idea of, 769. 

Manual-labor school idea, 564, 

Manual training high school in U.S., 79 

Manufacturing, rise of, 492. 

Manumission Society of N.Y., 660. 

Manuscripts, copying of, 132. 

Maria Theresa, 475, 562. 

Massachusetts Law of 1642, 326, 3^ 
Law of 1647, 365, 506; Law o' , 

Massachusetts school systerr 
tional provision for, 52 
basis of, 366. 

Maturitatspriifung, 573. 

Maurus, R., 155, 164. 

Mayo, Charles, 631. 

Mebrissensis, 253. 

Mechanics, 392. 

Mediaeval Church, repress 

Medisval education, char; ,^, 

174. 

Medieval man, transformatio, oi, 243. 

Mediaeval town, a typical, 203 . 

Medievalism, reaction against, 278. 

Medical inspection in schools, .823. 

Medical instruction, beginnings', of, 198; in 
Middle Ages, 226; in modern times, &o;^. 

Medicean Library, 250. I 

Medici, Cosimo de, 250, 257, 265. 

Melancthon, 270, 281, 289; his Sjaxonyplan, 
316. 

Mercator's map of the world, 39i. 

Methodism, rise of, 489. | , 

Methods of teaching, evolution of new, 756 



Middle Ages, deadly sins of, 173; problems 

faced by, 123; what started with, loi. 
Middle schools, 791. 

Migrations of peoples, 732-34; to U.S., 790. 
Mill, James, 625, 631. 
Milton, John, 399. 
Minnesingers, rise of, 186, 242. 
Mirabeau, Count de, 512. 
Modern studies, evolution of, 281. 
Mohammedans in Spain, 180-86; influence 

of, on Europe, 184-86. 
Monasteries, civilizing work of, 122; in 

Charlemagne's day, 136; preserve learning, 

129-36; suppression of, in England, 321. 
Monastic collections, 135. 
Monastic schools, 100, 128, 150, 152. 
Monasticism, rise of, 98. 
Monitorial system, in England, 624-30; in 

U.S., 662-64. 
Monroe Doctrine, 503, 717. 
Montaigne, 401. 
Monte Cassino, 99, 245. 
Montesquieu, 480. 
Montpellier as a medical center, 199, 225, 

226. 
More, Sir Thomas, 288. 
Morocco, education in, 741, 787. 
Mount Holyoke College, 698. 
'fulcaster, Richard, 432. 

'sic, in ancient Greece, 30; in Seven Lib- 
al Arts, 162, 280. 

oleon, 518; and technical education, 797; 
^anizing work of, in France, 590-95; in 
>lland, 712; in Italy, 603-07. 
-lal Convention of France, 515; work 
t8. 

Is in education, 836. 

3 of spirit of, 242, 473, 738; 
)mote, 789. 

'onal problems of the future 
led and experimental, 835. 

V of, 725. 
ns, 181. 
education in, 333. 

i-,. ginning of schools in, 36c, 

New J- .imer, 374. > 

New Jerse>, jarly educational history, 371; 
ehminatior of charity school in, 683. 

Newspapers, first, 309, 490, 491. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 388, 395, 423, 485. 

New York, attempt to divide the school 
funds in, 693; early educational history 
in, 368, 660, 666; elimination of rate bill 
in, 685; first State Superintendent, '687. 

New Zealand, education in, 716. 

Nicene Creed, 96, 196. 

Nobility, training of, in early Middle Ages, 
164-69; in later Middle Ages, 265-68; in 
early modern times, 403-05, 418, 462. 



Normal school, contribution of Pestalozzi to 
work of, 746-49; in France, 517, 595, 597, 
750; in Prussia, 561, 562, 570, 750; in 
U.S., 664, 745- 

Northmen, invasions of, 145. 

Nunneries, 100. 

Oberschulecollegium Board created, 564; 

aboUshed, 569. 
Odyssey, translation of, into Latin, 61. 
Orbis P ictus, 412-15, 441. 
Orphanages, first, 813. 
Orphans, care of, 821. 
Owen, Robert, 630. 

Pagan learning, rejection of, in West, 95. 

Page, a, 166. 

Paine, Tom, 622. 

Palace School of Charlemagne, 141. 

Palaestra, in ancient Greece, 31, 34. 

Palestine, education in, 741. 

Papal schism, the, 291, 302. 

Paper, invention of, 254. 

Paracelsus, 389. 

Paris, cathedral school at, 189, 217; rise of 
University of, 217, 225; work of Univer- 
sity of, 423. 

Parish school of early Middle Ages, 151. 

Pasteur, Louis, 726. 

Pauper school, 451. 

Pauper school idea, in England, 615; in U.S., 
679-84. 

Peabody, Elizabeth, 766. 

Pedagogy. See Education. 

Pennsylvania, early educational history of, 
369- 

Pennsylvania, Law of 1834, 681. 

Percy vail, John, 277. 

Peru, education in, 718. 

Pestalozzi, and Basedow compared, 538; and 
/ Froebel, 764; contribution of, 541-44; to 
teacher-training problem, 746-49, 760; 
Prussia sends teachers to study work of, 
569; spread of ideas of, 544; work of, 539- 
46. 

Peter the Great, 477. 

Peter the Lombard, 171, 191, 227. 

Petrarch, 244, 247, 265, 386, 424. 

Philadelphia, educational beginnings in, 652, 
666. 

Philanthropinum of Basedow, 536, 538. 

I^hilippines, education in, 740, 789. 

Philosophers banished from Rome, 63. 

Phrase books, 282. 

Physics, in Middle Ages, 162; modern, 724 

Piarists, 346. 

Pietism, 418. 

Pilgrimages, in Middle Ages, 200. 

Pilgrim's Progress, 491. 

Plato, 41. 

Political influences modify school, 787-95 



( 



INDEX 



84. 



X olitical pamp)^fets appear, 490. 

Polo, Marco. ^58. 

Poor-Law legislation in England, 325, 367, 
372. 

Porto Rico, education in, 740, 789. 

Pounds, John, 619. 

Precenter, the, 176. 

Presbyterians, Scotch, 299, 335. 

Press, freedom of, 490. 

Primary education in U.S., 666. 

Primer, the New England, 441. 

Primer, the religious, 440. 

Principia Regulative, the, 557. 

Printing, early presses, 256; invention of, 
254- 

Private adventure schools, 451. 

Probejahr, the, 573. 

Protestant revolts, results of, 296. 

Protestant school organization, 319. 

Providence, early educational beginnings in, 
662; grading of schoob in, 756-59. 

Prussia, benevolent rulers of, 473; earliest 
school laws for, 555, 557-61, 565; earliest 
Teachers' Seminaries in, 746 f.; humilia- 
tion of, 566 ; regeneration of, 566-79. 

Prussian school system, 577; 19th-century 
characteristics evolved, 578; modern pur- 
pose of, 585; reaction after 1848, 580-84; 
reorganization of 1872, 584. 

Psychology, becomes the master science, 755 ; 
history of modern, 826 

Ptolemy, 49, 160, 185, 385. 

Public meetings, first in England, 491. 

Public School Society of N.Y., 660. 

Punishments, school, 455. 

Pupil- teacher system, 753. 

Puritans, the, 299, 357, 488. 

Quadrivium, the, 158-62, 164, 280. 
Quintilian, 67, 155, 246. 
Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory, recovered, 
246, 257, 265. 

Rabelais, Fr., 398. 

Ragged Schools, 618, 619. 

Raikes,_Rpbert, 617. 

Rate bill, elimination of, in U.S., 684-86. 

Ratio Studiorum, 340. 

Ratke, Wolfgang, 607. 

Raumer, Karl Georg von, 545 f, 825. 

Raymer, Andreas, 317, 417. 

Reading, in ancient Greece, 28. 

Readmg schools, 445. 

Realien, 419, 796. 

Realism in education, 397-425. 

Realschule, first, 420; in Germany, 423, 582, 

775. 796. 
R( ♦or, the, in the University, 224. 
Rf rmation, the Protestant, 287-304; and 
ation, 351-53- 
aatories, juvenile, 813. 



Reform Bill, oi 1832 in England, 637; of 
1867 in England, 642. 

Rein, William, 762. 

Religions in the Roman world, 82. 

Religious freedom, 300, 489, 497. 

Religious societies for education in England, 
632. 

Religious theory for schools, 312, 437; weak- 
^ng of, 438, 493, 519. 

ReucWin, Johann, 255, 271, 289. 

Revolution in France, results of, 502. 

Revolutionary War in U.S., effect of, on edu- 
cation, 657. 

Rhetoric, in Seven Liberal Arts, 157; law a 
part of, 157; law separates from, 196; 
schools of, at Rome, 69. 

Rhode Island, Barnard in, 690; early educa- 
tion in, 368. 

Richter, Jean-Paul, 534. 

Ritter, Carl, 544 f. 

Ritterakademien, 405, 418, 462. 

Robinson Crusoe, 491. 

Rolland. 510. 

Roman cities, fate of, 117, 193; survival of 
law in, 194. 

Roman education, schools die out, 116; an- 
cient system, 721. 

Roman law, influence of, 117. 

Rome, barbarian inroads on, 11 1; debt to, 
102; education and work of, 53-78; great 
mission of, 55, 74-78. 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 483, 508, 530-33. 

Royal Society of Great Britain, 492. 

Russia, benevolent despots of 
teenth-century progre 
Catherine II, 477, 51 

St. Paul's School, 275 
Saleno, rise of medi 
Salzmann, C. G.. 
Sanitary science 
Sardinia, bep^'' 

organizat' 
Savonarol 
Savoy, e; 
Saxe-G' 
Saxon' 
'org 
i,ochar 
Schisn 
Scholat 
Scholast 
School c 

563- 
School soi 

u.s; 659. 

School suppoi 
Schools of ind 
Science, charac 

recovery of, ^ y 

industry, 492, > 



84^ 



1NI.:)EX 



ii. --C liools, X. t6, 744-46, 795; in ntiiversity, 

421, 773, 79V; nation's protector, 804. 
Scientific knowledge, advance of, in 19th 

century, 723; applications of, 727. 
Scientific method, beginnings of, 385. 
Scientific societies, rise of, 393, 492. 
Scotland, early education in, 335, 714. 
Scriptorium, the, 134. 
Secondary schools, rise of, in German lands, 

271; evolution of studies of, 281. 
Sectarian instruction, elimination of, in 

France, 602; in Italy, 61 r; in U.S., 691-95. 
Seguin, Edouard, 820. 
Seminaries for teachers, earliest, in German 

lands, 746 f. 
Seminars in German universities, 573, 577. 
Semler, Christopher, 420. 
Sense realism in education, 401-05. 
Seven Liberal Arts, in Middle Ages, 153; in 

Rome, 70; modification of, 279. 

Seven Perfections of Chivalry, 168. 

Silesian School Code of 1765, 559. 

Smith, Adam, 485, .620. 

S.P.C.K., 449-51, 615. 

S.P.G., 449, 615, 658. 

Societies, scientific, rise of, 393, 492. 

Sociologial influences in education, 812-24. 

Socrates, 43- 

Song schools, 151. 

Sophists, the, 41. 

South Africa, education in, 717. 

.L-Soain, 18th-century benevolent rulers, 476. 
"■-i ... 

-^S,j education in, 22-23. 

■ ._. ~ -Srst, 309. 



•irst, 689. 
-ments, early 



stance of, 



ed. 



657; 
in on, 



5, 220. 

.d, 637, 642; 
'nificance of 



Sundr- ■ ' -vini. ^ .1 ■■. 

Sunday Schools, in BerUn, 56:^, in England 

616-18, in U.S., 658. 
Superior children, education of, 821. 
Sweden, educational system of, 297, 713 

manual instruction in, 769. 
Sydenham, Thomas, 392, 395. 

Talleyrand, 513, 516. 

Taxation for education, beginnings of, 677. 

Teacher training, beginnings of, 745-48; con 

tributions of Pestalozzi to, 746-49; th« 

first normal schools, 750-54. 
Teachers' certificates, first, 176. 
Teachers, character of, in i8th century, 446, 

452. 
Teachers' Colleges, 827. 
Teachers' Seminaries in Germany, 561, 562, 

570, 746 f. 
Teaching methods by i8th century, 454. 
Teaching Orders, Catholic, 345. 
Technical education, beginnings of, 797; 

in U.S., 798; impulses to the develop- 
ment of, 799. 
Tetzel and indulgences, 294. 
Te.xtbooks by the i8th century, 439; ot 

the Middle Ages, 162. 
Theodulf of Orleans, 144. 
Theology, in the mediaeval universities, 227 

422; rise of study of, 169-7':. 
Thirteenth century, the wonderful, 241. 
Thirty Years' War, the, 301. 
Thomas Aquinas, 191, 227. 
Tournaments, 165. 
Tours, battle of, 113. 
Trade and commerce, revival ~f, 205. 
Trade routes, early, 206; of the moderr 

world, 733. 
Trent, Council of, 303. 
Trigonometry, study of, begun, 280, 392. 
Trivium, the, 155-58, 164, 222, 280. 
Troubadours, rise of, 186, 242. 
Troy Seminary founded, 698. 
Truce of God, 166, 187. 
Turgot, 480, SIX, 800. 
Twelve Tables, the, 59. 

Ulphilas, Bishop, 119. 

United States, awakening an educational 
consciousness in, 658-67; battles for 
schools, and alignments of people, 672-74; 
beginnings of State universities, 657; of 
teacher training, 751; early colleges in, 
657; efJcct of Revolutionary War on edu- 
cation, 654. 

Universities, evolution of, 216; faculties in, 
223-25; German, American students at, 
576 f.; instruction in, 225-33, 421; in the 
U.S., State, 657, 702-07; mediaeval, rise 
of, 215-35; new modern foundations, 793; 
of ancient Greek world, 47. 



INDEX 



849 



I 



University expansion, recent, 792. 
University mothers, 218. 
University of Alexandria, 48. 
University of Berlin, 574-77. 
University of France, 512, 593. 
University of the State of New York, 524. 
University of Virginia, founded, 526. 
University privileges granted, 220, 534. 
Uprising of Prussia of 1813, 568, 572. 
Urbino, Ducal library at, 251. 
Ursulines, 346. 
Usher, school, 758. 

Vatican Library founded, 252. 
Venetians capture Constantinople, 201 ; de- 
velop trade and commerce, 205. 
Venice, center of book trade, 257, 265. 
Vernacular schools, introduction of science 

instruction into, 416; rise of, 309, 352, 430. 
Vesalius, 198, 389: 
Vespasiano, 251. 
Victor Emmanuel, 609. 
Vinet, Ehe, 269. 
Virchow, 726. 
Virginia, early educational history, 371; 

JeflFerson's plan for education in, 525. 
Vittarino da Feltre, 265. 
Vocational education, beginnings of, in U.S., 

809-12; in Germany, 780, 807; need for, 

805. 
Volksschule, German, 315, 353, 571, 577, 

581, 582. 
Voltaire, 480, 485. 
Voluntary educational system in England, 

616, 645; work of, in establishing schools, 

632. 
/uigate Bible, 131, 170. 



Waldenseemiiller, his Geography, 258. 

Walther von der Vogelweide, 294. 

Washington, George, 525; his will, 657. 

Watt, James, 493. 

Weber and modern psychology, 826. 

Webster, Noah, 443. 

Wedgwood and potterj', 493. 

Wedmore, Peace of, 145. 

Weimar, schools in duchy of, 317, 417. 

Wesley, John, 489. 

Wessel, Johann, 254, 271. 

Westphalia, Peace of, 302, 417, 834. 

Whitbread, 625, 631, 633. 

White man's burden, the, of future, 839. 

Whitfield, George, 489. 

Willard, Emma, 698. 

WilMam and Ma-y College, 372, 657, 702. 

Winchester Schocl founded, 277. 

Workhouse schools 453. 

Workingmen, interest of, in education ir 

U.S., 671. 
Writing schools, 445. 
Wundt and modern psychology', 8 '^, 
Wiirtemberg, plan of 1559, 317; scuVols in 

439.545- 
Wycliffe, John, 290, 297, 311. 

Xenophon, 42. 

Yale College, early history of, 657, 702 

founding of, 367. 
York, cathedral school at, 139. 
Yverdon, 541, 544, 749. 

Zeller, Carl August, 545, 569. 
Ziller, Tuiskon, 762. 
ZwingU, Huldreich, 297, 311. 



-^ 



Aj,^" -<?■ 



'% ^ ^ ■* ^O^ 



. #■ 



>\> 













.^^ 


*'' .- 












•~ ■'?■ 










v- 


V 


" t 










kO°„ 


y 1 
















'"^".^ 


^r:.*^^^' 








> 


% 




O' 









' ..o'J".- 



»<!> ''-'- 



.oc>. 









." r^' 



,a\ 



\ 



A\^ 






^^.^r.^^^o^ 



V' 



"</' 



t/> 



^ -^^ 





^' <^^ 


■* 






-0^ . '' 






■-5-, 



"^^^ .-J^ 



vi^ .^ 









^0O. 












.0^' 












nV •/>. 



Q 



o. 









<s^ 





0^' 


";- 


o' : 






-./. v' - 




^ o. 








v. 



A-^ .^^ 



. S - , , '^ * ■" N O 



-.-^^ % 






^ <^^ - 









\" 









,.v 



■^-^ -><. 










■%^^^ 


? - .^ ^. ; 




.A^' ^P 




vOo. 



\^ 



O 0' 






^^> 



;> '-C 



